[applepple]

Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market. Businesses just follow the money. It can be as inefficient as society allows it to become. As long as most people can ignore the reality.

If the banks were only loaning people money to collect sea shells, then the entire global economy would end up revolving around sea shell collection.

Then some rational people would eventually write books claiming that seashell collection is a bullshit job, we don't need so many seashells... Then people like you would post comments saying "That's not true, obviously we need seashells because capitalism would never allow for such inefficiency."

[CRConrad]

> Our society is not capitalist. New currency is constantly being printed out of nothing and pumped into the system. That's not a free market.

I don't know which it's more of; mysterious or annoying that people keep repeating this... simplistic fallacy. WTF does one have to do with the other?!? "Capitalism" or "a free market" is how the game is played or what it is about; "currency" or the monetary supply is just the markers used to count points in the game. They're not the same thing.

In the game of Monopoly new currency is injected constantly, when players get 200 $ (? IIRC) for completing each lap around the board. Does that make the goal of the game not about amassing all the money[1] and bankrupting the other players? No, of course not. The goal of the game and the markers used to count progress towards that goal are different things.

Conflating them is committing a stupid fallacy, even more so in real life than in the game.

____

[1]: All the money in circulation, regardless of how much that happens to be.

[applepple]

There is a massive difference. In monopoly, everyone gets the same amount when they cross 'Go'. If we had taken the rule from the real world, people would be paid proportionally to their net worth (value of all assets). Real life is even less fair than monopoly in that aspect.

If two people own shares of a company which grows at 10% per year; one person owns $1 million worth of shares and another owns $1000 worth of shares. The first person gets $100K worth of additional wealth in the first year, the other person gets only $100... Then the following year, the compounding effect increases the gap between them even more.

Even if that growth was completely natural (no central bank intervention), it would still be unfair... But what makes the system so incredibly unjust is that all this growth is ARTIFICIAL. The central banks print money and push it into the economy; the institutions on the front line then basically use that new money to pay one another for services; thus wiping out each other's debts using the freshly printed money. It's a giant, multi-layer pyramid scheme.

[dools]

Nothing like a bit of reduction ad absurdum to start the day.

I don’t deny that there is some wasted effort, what I argue against is that the amount of truly wasted effort is significant and that the measure for whether or not a job is bullshit should be that the person doing the job thinks it shouldn’t exist.

We are capitalist in as much as you and I are allowed to build a machine and pay people to run it. I agree there are no free markets, all markets are created by governments just as all currency is.