[idle_zealot]

I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing.

In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

[tripletpeaks]

If I read their post correctly, they’re saying they wouldn’t mind rich people if money didn’t… do the stuff that money does. But it does, so they do.

Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.

[zdragnar]

Being rich is a measure of wealth. In a world in which there is no resource scarcity and everyone has access to lots of resources, everyone is rich but not necessarily more rich or powerful than anyone else.

The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.

Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.

Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).

[bigbadfeline]

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"

In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.

At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).

We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.

Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.

[nielsbot]

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money

That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.

Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.

[idopmstuff]

I don't think you even have to go to the extreme of compelling someone to do something through the legal system. I can use money to get someone to clean my house or walk my dog - they don't have to do it, but the fact that I have money does give me the power to get them to do what I want.

[bpt3]

Can you compel someone to walk your dog because you have enough money to pay someone to do it, or are they choosing to do it to earn some money?

[lucyjojo]

i mean... if people don't get money they die so....

[bpt3]

So if they want to live, they are compelled to do some sort of work somewhere at some point, which is the nature of the human condition (along with all other living beings).

That doesn't mean you can force them to work for you specifically because you have the amount of money you deem sufficient for a specific task.

It feels like a lot of people have forgotten that this is how nature works, not that all of your needs are the responsibility of everyone around you.

[nielsbot]

Absolutely--This was just an example that came to mind in the moment.

[thrance]

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Of course it does. Call the cleaning service, see if your money can't compel someone to come clean your house while you sit on your ass. Or more indirectly, try to picture the chinese kid making your shoes for a meager wage, and try to explain what, if not your money, is compelling them to do so this menial, repetitive and unfulfilling task for you.

[palata]

What the hell are you talking about?

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

[bigbadfeline]

> What the hell are you talking about?

I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.

Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.

I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.

[palata]

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.

> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money

That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.

> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.

Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.

> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.

You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.

[bigbadfeline]

> You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.

As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.

The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.

I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.

[like_any_other]

> In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing?

A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.

Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.

[fsflover]

Enforcing such laws becomes practically impossible when the monopoly becomes wealthier than many countries. Case in point: this court decision. Why do you think it happened? Probably because Google is too wealthy.

[pdonis]

> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action

Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.

[Yizahi]

It is theoretically and practically impossible that free market could exist. Every unregulated market will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player and it will stop being free by definition.

It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.

[pdonis]

> unregulated market

A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.

The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am.

> will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player

The claim that this is a problem of free markets, as opposed to non-free ones, is historically false. Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. THe original meaning of the word "monopoly" was permission from the king to be the sole seller of a particular product or service.

[Yizahi]

> It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.

So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different.

So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.

> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players.

Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.

[pdonis]

> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.

No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people.

Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.

[Yizahi]

My point was not that government is better or worse than corporate oligarchy in a question of governing. It's all the same people, same humans, just with different labels.

My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc.

And to address your second comment, about competition:

Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors.

Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.

[pdonis]

> And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control

Nonsense. It was because the government had control, and could force people to accept that it was giving special privileges to certain players. For example, the railroad barons in the late 19th century US who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes. The people had no choice about accepting that. In a free market, there would have been competition, and that would have ended up resulting in better service. How do we know that? Because that's what happened until the government stepped in and gave special privileges to certain players.

In other words, your view is exactly backwards to what has actually happened.

[worik]

> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players

Really?

* Search: What special privilege for Google?

* Desktop OS: Microsoft?

* On line retail: Amazon

What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

> These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.

[majewsky]

So we're back to square one then, and came to agree on the original premise: Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action.

[TFYS]

There are probably very few things people wouldn't do if the price is high enough. How many people would refuse to lick a boot for ten million dollars? The bigger the wealth differences become, the harder it is to resist the people with wealth. Wealth is the same thing as power, denying that is silly.

[account42]

Plus even if you resits the cash incentive yourself, with enough money other people can be bought to impose other kinds of pressures on you.

[teachrdan]

> people have the option to refuse to accept your money...

This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.

But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.

[pdonis]

> A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them.

That depends on how the safeguards are implemented. If they are implemented through coercive taxation, you don't have a free market, because people don't have the right to refuse to pay taxes, even if they disagree with how the money will be used.

> Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.

Can you give an example?

> the owning class

What you're saying here is something different from what you said above. The problem you're now pointing to is not that rich people have power because they're rich, but that they have power because own too much other than just money. For example, they might own all the housing in the area you want to live in, so you either have to look elsewhere or accept renting on whatever terms they offer.

The solution for that isn't a "social welfare net". It's to restrict how much non-monetary property a rich person can own. And also to make it easier for people who aren't rich to own more things--for example, to own homes.

By the way, your use of the term "owning class" implies that ownership is somehow a bad thing, or that it's naturally restricted to a certain class of people. But that's not how things should be. Ownership gives you control. For example, if you own the home you live in, you're much better protected from various possible bad things forcing you to move, than if you rent. But that also means people need to be willing to accept the responsibilities that come with ownership. It appears that many people in our current society aren't--but they also don't want to accept the tradeoffs of giving up ownership. That's not a stable situation. You can't get something for nothing. And the best "safety net" a person can have is to own as many of the things they depend on as possible.

[nielsbot]

People like to talk about politically tyranny, but forgot about the tyranny of capitalism.

We've financialized servitude is all.

[Supermancho]

Many people decry the tyranny of capitalism, but this site tends to lean into it and defend it at every turn because capitalism is painted as the tide that lifts all boats, despite the bodies on the ocean floor. Some believe, wholeheartedly that a few regulations is all that is needed to establish a fair free market, despite evidence to the contrary. ANY niche market where a world-spanning monopoly can be established, makes a mockery of regulation time and time again.

[bpt3]

What is the alternative to capitalism you propose? Every alternative has resulted in many more "bodies on the ocean floor".

[pdonis]

Capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. A free market means all transactions are voluntary. That's how wealth gets built--by voluntary cooperation among productive people through specialization and trade.

Capitalism is just the view that one should try to accumulate more capital, by hook or by crook. And there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve any kind of productive work, much less building wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. Buying government favors, for example, which is how most big-time "capitalists" in US history did it (for example, the railroad barons who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes). Today they do it by buying regulations that favor them.

[gspencley]

> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it

Citation required.

Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.

Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.

You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.

Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.

[NoGravitas]

The barter myth is just that, a myth. Barter has never been observed in any society that had not previously been using money. Money, in fact, appears to arise not organically, but from the need early states to maintain standing armies. Creating markets denominated in currency allows you to simply pay your troops rather than maintaining their entire supply chain even when not on the march. And then requiring that taxes be paid in currency gives everyone a reason to accept currency for payment. It transforms your entire economy into a machine for feeding soldiers. This is not a thought experiment like the barter myth; it is documented in ancient sources from India, Mesopotamia, and China.

An article treatment: https://archive.is/20250725000932/https://www.theatlantic.co...

A book treatment (that of course covers many other things): https://archive.org/details/DebtTheFirst5000Years

[TheCoelacanth]

That's not how barter really worked in practice.

Pre-modern societies generally had very little currency and only used it for large transactions. Smaller transactions happened through debt and transfers of debt.

The transaction wouldn't be "I give you a bunch of milk and you give me a house" it would be "You give me the house and I'll give you milk every day for the next 5 years" or something like that.

Or it might be "Bob owes me a calf the next time his cow gives birth. I'll transfer that debt to you and give you eggs for a year and you give me the house."

Vendors who have debt relationships with a very large number of people would often get together with other vendors and swap debts to consolidate them into a more manageable number of debts.

Even if the debt was denominated in units of currency, it was typically settled in goods rather than currency because typical people just didn't have access to much currency.

[branko_d]

Can Elon Musk confiscate your property, limit your freedom of movement, or outright kill you?

There were times in history where having a lot of money was correlated to having all those powers. There are places in this world where that’s still the case.

[lucyjojo]

if he wanted to he very probably de-facto could.