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We both know that money is an abstraction. So are shares. > You're asking if one abstraction (ownership of a piece of a factory, land, or other business) ever needs to be converted into another (fiat money) to be worthwhile. I'm really, really not. I'm saying that the act of buying a share with money you already have is zero-sum if that share can never be expected to pay back some sort of dividend. Shares are only superior as value-stores to fiat currency because they have an expected value higher than their cost. The reason they do so is either because you expect to be able to sell them for more to the next sucker (zero-sum), or because you expect some kind of benefit out of it (dividends of some sort). But beyond that, there are plenty of zero-sum stores of value, like gold, Bitcoin, or unproductive land. In a fictional world where shares never pay any dividends, they are strictly worse than fiat currency. They are absolutely subject to inflation - it's called share dilution, and it happens all the time. They are not inherently tied to the means of production, because if they did, you could expect to extract some surplus value from the means of production - for them not be able to pay dividends they must be in some intrinsic way alienated from production, whether by speculation or whatever else may be. > As a footnote, in the acquisition scenario, someone ultimately gets something they want. If I have a company with 1000 acres of land, five pieces of mining equipment, and so on, at the very end, it gets carved up into that stuff. That stuff has real, tangible value. It only has real, tangible value beyond the price you paid for it if you manage to get some productive out of it and extract a surplus out of a production eventually down the line (profit, dividends, etc...). If it remains a dead asset, its value is unrealized and zero-sum. |