ckaihatsu wrote:
Could you include *all* natural monopolies, *and* all rent-extraction, as being that of *rentier* capital -- ?
Truth To Power wrote:
I don't consider "rentier capital" a meaningful term. In classical economics, "capital" referred to producer goods, which have no rentier element. It's more informative to talk of assets based on privilege rather than production. An asset like a factory adds to total wealth; it relieves scarcity. An asset like a land title, taxi medallion, bank license, IP monopoly, etc. does not add to total wealth or relieve scarcity (often it aggravates scarcity), it just legally entitles the owner to take wealth from others.
Truth To Power wrote:
based on privilege rather than production
*You* mean *government-sanctioned* (administration) 'privilege' more-specificially, correct -- ?
Social Production Worldview
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(Again.)
Truth To Power wrote:
I don't consider "rentier capital" a meaningful term. In classical economics, "capital" referred to producer goods, which have no rentier element. It's more informative to talk of assets based on privilege rather than production. An asset like a factory adds to total wealth; it relieves scarcity. An asset like a land title, taxi medallion, bank license, IP monopoly, etc. does not add to total wealth or relieve scarcity (often it aggravates scarcity), it just legally entitles the owner to take wealth from others.
Government administrative ('public-sector') interests *aside* for the moment, I'll address the *private sector* aspect -- the aforementioned investment capital used for infrastructure / the-means-of-mass-industrial-production, and also for hiring wage labor.
[2] G.U.T.S.U.C., Simplified
What does the outlay of capital *do*, regarding *labor* -- ? Capital designates *where* (etc.) the commodity-productive process is going to be, but capital *itself* doesn't do commodity-production, correct -- ?
If capital itself *could* do commodity production and make sales and collect revenue and extract profits, then the employer wouldn't even *need* to bother with hiring any wage labor.
But does money beget money -- ? No, money will *not* spontaneously grow greater and increase in size if left on its own -- there *has* to be a process involved that *increases* overall value, using more than just money itself.
M-C-M' (money is used to buy a commodity which is resold to obtain a larger sum of money)[19]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_(Marxism)#Forms_of_commodity_trade
Labor-power / the labor commodity *impels* the commodity productive process, based on the outlay of equity capital. Wage labor, then, confers *value* / labor-power, into the commodity production process, which *could* be thought of as 'labor value'. Labor power is *productive* of commodities, while assets like land and natural monopolies are *non-productive* -- maybe we can make up a *name* for that kind of thing, if not 'rentier capital'.
And the factory building *itself* -- is that economically 'productive', or not -- is the factory building *indispensible* to the production process, or is it strictly the productive machinery, *inside* of the factory building, that is the active productive component -- ?
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ckaihatsu wrote:
I'm not talking about commercial paper or corporate bonds
Truth To Power wrote:
Neither am I. I'm talking about demand deposit money, which is mostly outstanding bank loan principal.
Yeah, no prob -- you can *have* that reformism, to 'mitigate' fractional reserve lending or whatever, but do you really think that that would be *sufficient* to overcome the *systemic* problems that you rail on about, like '[land] privilege' -- ?
In past threads you've been *unable* to address the 'transitional' issue -- which is necessary for *any* posited political 'vision' -- of how exactly society and its conceivable geoist government could *obtain* all of the land parcels that are currently under private ownership.
Consciousness, A Material Definition
[10] Supply prioritization in a socialist transitional economy
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Truth To Power wrote:
Fiat currency is a very minor part of the money supply. Most money is debt money issued by private commercial banks when they lend. The entire outstanding principal is part of the money supply, mostly in the form of demand deposits.
If fiat currency is 'a very minor part of the money supply', then why does your 'geoist' / libertarian politics make such a claptrap out of it -- ?
I'll also note that the *political* concern here is -- as ever -- with the government's *discretion* / power over such matters of money-supply policy. (Note El Salvador and cryptocurrency here.)
World Business Watch | El Salvador's bitcoin experiment: $60 million lost | Bitcoin | English News
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ckaihatsu wrote:
so that any random given currency note *may* represent real labor-derived value, or it may be a government *debt* issuance.
Truth To Power wrote:
Notes are a small part of the money supply.
This is *tangential*, though.
You're sidestepping the point that capital for investment partially goes to the 'constant costs' for capital -- private infrastructure basically.
This 'infrastructure' capital, *plus* the remaining investment capital for hiring *wage labor*, for commodity production, has a certain chance of generating revenue, for *profits*.
Given that this sample pool of investment capital *does* make a profit, *that* development would *increase* the pool of total capital, *beyond* the initial sum of pooled capital.
This resulting increase in total equity value, over the initial investment amount, means that the *economy's* total equity value (not necessarily face-values) has increased as well, correct -- ?
The owner could readily cash-out right after the first production run of the factory, and would have more cash / value *after*, than when s/he *started*, correct -- ?
Now -- where did that *additional increment in value* come from -- ?
material-economic exploitation
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ckaihatsu wrote:
What is one dollar *worth*, or equivalent-to -- ?
Truth To Power wrote:
Whatever it will buy.
ckaihatsu wrote:
So then since labor is a 'production factor', what problem do you have with the *labor theory of value* -- ?
Truth To Power wrote:
It's just wrong. First, there are other production factors, and second, value also applies to things that labor never produced at all, like land.
Okay, then how did any given parcel of land receive its *initial* valuation? (How *should* any given parcel of land receive its initial *geoist* valuation -- ?)
Truth To Power wrote:
Jevons proved the Labor Theory of Value is false more than 150 years ago. Socialists who cling to it are as objectively wrong as creationists, and have been for almost as long.
ckaihatsu wrote:
You're *describing* the labor theory of value in the next segment:
ckaihatsu wrote:
Are employees the spoils of corporate warfare? Just for decoration? Bragging rights? How does wage labor fit into the business' business plan, exactly -- ?
Truth To Power wrote:
Like any other production factor, the producer thinks he can get it for less than the value it contributes to his product. If he buys equipment, raw materials, fuel, buildings, vehicles, etc., it's all because he thinks it will contribute more to the value of his product than he has to pay for it.
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Truth To Power wrote:
Nope. Value is what a thing would trade for. That's all. I am describing the fact that producers apply labor to producing a product until the marginal value that the labor contributes is equal (or at least close) to its marginal cost. The product's value doesn't come from the fact that labor is applied to it. Rather, labor is applied to producing it as long as that labor contributes more value to the product than it costs. The Labor Theory of Value gets cause and effect reversed. See Jevons.
You're saying 'supply-and-demand', but you haven't addressed the point about this that I've raised previously, about money having to do a physically-impossible *triple-duty* of valuating these three *different* economic components: [1] manufacture, [2] supply-and-demand, and [3] the consumer's own subjective use-value, or 'utility'.
ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, you're saying that the market measures the day-by-day *fluctuations* in the value of a commodity, due to the balance between the forces of supply and demand.
Now -- what about the *costs of production*. If I use available funds to manufacture something, I'm going to be looking for pricing -- irrespective of subsequent supply-and-demand pricing fluctuations -- that gives me a *return* on my money.
This is my standing critique of capitalist 'money' / exchange-values, that it's having to do *triple duty*, which is impossible -- here's recently from another thread:
ckaihatsu wrote:
[T]he radial gradient of metropolitan upscale land values, outward, means that the real estate pricings / values are out-of-whack with the *utility* provided to renters / owners / users of land. In other words we're all led to believe by default that market real estate prices are 'valid', and that they somehow reflect the *use*, or utility, that people get out of each unit or parcel.
But this obviously can't be the case, because these market prices *fluctuate*, according to supply-and-demand, as you've covered. So if more people are economically 'demanding' pricier areas with their money, then the price goes *up*, as we're currently seeing. This pricing / valuation then has *little* to do with the cost of *creating* that unit or parcel, nor does it accurately reflect the sense of 'use value' to the purchaser / renter, in the sense of proportion-of-income (spent on rent).
Yet we're expected to believe that the one 'price' value can somehow represent *all three* variables / qualities at once, 'use', 'supply and demand', and 'construction', all at once.
viewtopic.php?p=15249613#p15249613
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ckaihatsu wrote:
You *need* Stalinism to be called 'socialism', don't you -- ?
Truth To Power wrote:
Stalinism was socialism. Nothing to do with me.
Okay, cool then -- I'm just going to leave these here, if that's okay with you.
Socialism is a left-wing[1] economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership[2] of the means of production[3][4] as opposed to private ownership.[5][6][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
[Stalinism]
Proletarian state
Traditional communist thought holds that the state will gradually "wither away" as the implementation of socialism reduces class distinction. However, Stalin argued that the proletarian state (as opposed to the bourgeois state) must become stronger before it can wither away. In Stalin's view, counter-revolutionary elements will attempt to derail the transition to full communism, and the state must be powerful enough to defeat them. For this reason, communist regimes influenced by Stalin have been widely described as totalitarian.[21] Other leftists, such as anarcho-communists, have criticized the party-state of the Stalin-era Soviet Union, accusing it of being bureaucratic and calling it a reformist social democracy rather than a form of revolutionary communism.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinism ... rian_state
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ckaihatsu wrote:
You said 'Big Lie' -- that's specifically fascism.
Truth To Power wrote:
The term was coined to apply to fascism, but the concept applies in lots of other cases. It's a kind of gaslighting.
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Truth To Power wrote:
Religion uses the Big Lie all the time. It might even be the original case.
The new and reinvigorated civilisations shared certain common features as well as the use of iron. They saw a proliferation of new crafts; a growth of long distance trade; a rise in the importance of merchants as a social class; the use of coins to make it easy even for lowly cultivators and artisans to trade with each other; the adoption (except in China) of new, more or less phonetically based, alphabets which made literacy possible for much wider numbers of people; and the rise of ‘universalistic’ religions based on adherence to a dominant god, principle of life or code of conduct.
Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 47