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by CerealFounder 1866 days ago
Your moralizing a non moral argument. Its simply harder to get access to someone else's capital than someone else's time. So people can charge a premium for the capital.

I do believe that premium is probably a bit higher than it should be because it used to be EVEN HARDER to get that capital so people are pointing out the slightly outdated examples of cost in order to gain negotiating leverage.

In the end our time and money have no intrinsic value, but try asking a friend to help you move and then try asking your friend to loan you money to hire movers and see which they are more likely to do.

3 comments

I think the big difference is that worker time can’t be saved in the same way that capital can be. While capital will lose value over time to inflation, it still holds most of its value if it is not spent (and there are very safe investments that can be used to hold even more of its value across time) An investor can choose to hold their capital for a better investment at a later time.

For a worker, however, every minute of labor is use it or lose it... it isn’t like a worker can look at the available jobs and say “nah, I think I’ll just save up my time for now and wait for a better opportunity to spend my labor hours”. You can’t wait a few months and then trade all those months of labor for more money later.

> Your moralizing a non moral argument.

I'm responding to a common moralizing argument:

> > A common reason I hear for the fact that investors get more equity is because of the "risk" they take on

> Its simply harder to get access to someone else's capital than someone else's time. So people can charge a premium for the capital.

That's just another consequence of our current system favoring those with capital. There's a glut of capital, it's just allocated in manners that favor asset owners over those who work for a living.

A more democratic approach to capital access wouldn't necessarily have to tip the scales in favor of those who already have it.

You are justifying a system with the system itself. Why does it have to be hard to access capital? Worse that hard, why is there a very very tiny number of (undemocratic, unaccountable) people deciding who gets to access capital?

Why couldn't we think of a more democratic way of allocating credit/capital/finance to people and businesses?