| > wealth is made by work It’s also naturally abundant in the form of land, those cadastral game tiles on which life plays out, dominion of which are allocated by the state in a system of hereditary monopolies. Wealth is not allocated the same way it’s created. That’s why we have the concept of rent-seeking, behavior that increases one’s share of wealth without creating more wealth. Owning wealth lets you accumulate more wealth without working, because you can charge other people rent in exchange for using your wealth. Not only that; you can also hire people in an arrangement where you automatically own everything they produce using your capital goods. Rich people know that labor is a very inefficient and tedious way to increase one’s own share of wealth. That’s why they prefer rent, interest, and staying on the top of the employment hierarchy where they have a legal claim on the products of others’ labor. Yes, work is a true source of wealth, and so is capital and land and the other factors of production. There’s a long history of criticizing how most of the wealth created by working ends up owned by the owners of capital and land—that’s the essential critical point in the discussion of capitalism, whether Marxist or Georgist or Ellermanite. Or you could say the crucial question is how can we cure the rich people from the delusion that they have a right to appropriate what they have not produced?” |
you could just as well say that people are rent seeking with their labor, using the capital of their bodies.
if you deny personal ownership of property and land and the ability to extract wealth for rent from that ownership you may as well also deny personal ownership of one's own body and personal space and the ability earn income for renting out one's time, or professional service or the capital of one's body. that gets you to slavery in one step, well done.
so the simplistic argument that labor capacity of people is fundamentally different to other capital is false. consider that you invested your time and your money in your education to better your skills increasing your ability to rent on your own capital. if you want to deny people extracting money from their investments and property why not also deny them extracting money from their investments in their own education?
so again I think on the premature path to compassion and equality in your mind you have actually found a shortcut which disempowers people and limits their freedoms. I don't think you did this intentionally, you just haven't thought it through.
I understand the temporary appeal but it does not actually provide a workable solution to the problems you are trying to address.
the next step is consider what the second-order effects of policies inspired by your theories would be. the ultimate goal of this is to create a dependent slave class to do the bidding of the elites. these theories have been designed for mass appeal.