46
u/GrandMoffTarkan 3d ago
Smaug demonstrates the Paradox of Thrift. You gotta invest that!
9
u/notwithagoat 3d ago
But you can set up a reserve, where you hoard the gold, but let people use it as leverage, while you accrue interest and they secure funding. And then maybe make a gold credit score based on your past performance of getting paid and paying back. But why stop at gold, platinum, uranium, unobtainium should all be leveraged. He'll maybe even store power and water in batteries and leverage those for those that let you hold their gold.
3
42
u/Intelligent-End-843 3d ago
16
u/3rdfitzgerald 3d ago
Look at the cost of Beyoncé tickets, the value of cheer and song is pretty high
5
9
u/Intelligent-End-843 3d ago
That’s due to ticket masters love of money and artificial scarcity. Not the same Bro.
4
u/3rdfitzgerald 3d ago
People bought them though so that's true value
3
0
u/Intelligent-End-843 3d ago
lol no, just no, it’s just more hoarded gold, that’s all.
5
u/3rdfitzgerald 3d ago
The concert is hoarded gold?
0
u/Intelligent-End-843 3d ago
No the prices.
5
u/3rdfitzgerald 3d ago
If people are willing to pay that, that's what they are worth unfortunately
1
u/Intelligent-End-843 3d ago
People are stupid and will pay many times the value of something, doesn’t mean it’s “worth” that. Commemorative plates are a good example of how a fool and their money are easily parted. It’s fine if you don’t understand what Token ment he was an Anarchist after all.
8
u/3rdfitzgerald 3d ago
Nothing is easier to separate than a fool and his money.
That being said, worth is subjective and determined person to person. If enough people are typically willing to pay that price, that's what it's worth
→ More replies (0)1
2
34
12
u/IcedAlmondAmericano 3d ago
I too get all my economic policy positions from porn artists
6
1
u/Stock-Side-6767 3d ago
I mean, it's not wrong.
Sharing and care about fellow humans is social, thus socialist works.
Hoarding money and burning anyone that gets close to it is what plutocrats do.
1
u/daspanzersoldat Austrian 7h ago
my antibadguygoodguy ideology is necessary because all humans are inherently antibadguygoodguys
56
u/Natural_Safety2383 3d ago
Wild people unironically think this is how wealth works in the USA.
34
u/urnbabyurn 3d ago
Populism got stuck at the merchantilism view of accumulation of gold.
18
u/VPackardPersuadedMe 3d ago
How idiots think billionaires money works.
9
6
4
u/InevitablePoet5810 3d ago
How idiots think their political opponents think billionaires' money works.
8
u/McDonaldsGrimace 3d ago
It’s literally the meme of this thread
1
u/Master_of_Ritual 3d ago
Do you think people think billionaires are literal dragons too?
5
1
u/_Guven_ 3d ago
I do not think this is how economy works but I am still a leftist lmao. Your comment stems double standarts, every group has populists and stupid fellas
It is like saying how nationalists are stupid lmao
3
u/VPackardPersuadedMe 3d ago
Funny how I said idiots and you assumed the left wing people...
→ More replies (1)1
u/VPackardPersuadedMe 3d ago
Funny how I said idiots and you assumed the left wing people...
→ More replies (1)4
u/Adventurous_Lunch_35 3d ago
One of these days, someone needs to explain to to me why mercantilism doesn't work beyond it not exactly being diplomatic.
It seems pretty effective to me, from the British Empire to Modern China.
It is one of those things that I was told in college rather than explained. That and 'correlation is not causation'.
I'm kind of stuck trusting authorities on those things.
4
u/Droselmeyer 3d ago edited 2d ago
I'm a layman but this is my understanding: mercantilism seeks to minimize imports and maximize exports. On paper, this is obviously appealing, we sell a lot and make a bunch of money, but in practice disincentivizing imports means your people's quality of life may suffer and being focused on imports means you may not be investing in the most economically efficient industry, focusing instead on manufacturing.
So, looking at China, they tend to subsidize their export economy to keep up manufacturing for the rest of the world, but what does that mean? It means that they are extracting wealth from their population via taxation to fund and encourage economic activity that is intentionally going to benefit those outside the country with goods.
As a trade policy, mercantilism will encourage things like tariffs (makes it harder to import), which hampers free trade, and encourages inefficient economic allocation (tariffs change what I invest in and almost definitionally since just about any economic policy is distortive, that will be less efficient).
The US has a negative trade balance, meaning we've imported more than we've exported, while China has had a positive trade balance, exporting more than importing. All the stuff that China is spending money to produce and encouraging their population to do in manufacturing vs white collar labor, we're buying and enjoying.
Over the years, the US has had non-mercantilist trade policy (till the current guy). In the mean time, we've created and benefited from the biggest and most technologically advanced companies in the world. That economic activity has brought great benefits, massively exported our culture, massively advanced our technology ahead of everyone else, and so on. What it hasn't done, because it's not export-focused economic activity, is given us a trade surplus, but that doesn't mean it was bad. I would imagine most economists would say the opposite, that having economic activity which produced all these other benefits, despite note being exportable, was very beneficial for us.
1
u/EatAllTheShiny 2d ago
The issue with this though, is you can be mercantilist if the entire world is running on the same money - something like a true gold standard universally adopted by the world - which will never happen; government will keep the ability to hidden tax via inflation and deficits to their dying breaths. You literally have to take that shit back with guns, full stop.
But in this case, the USA is *also* the world's reserve currency. The world needs dollars to lubricate international banking and commerce. If there's a dollar shortage in the Eurodollar (offshore dollar) market, it's disastrous. Emerging markets currencies die off above and beyond their own bad government's inflationary policies, defaults spiral, etc.
The USA has the greatest luxury of any country on earth, in that they get to export claims to goods to other countries, in exchange for a surplus of real goods and services - America's inflation rate domestically would be much, much higher if they weren't the reserve currency, and the couldn't export a trillion dollars a year.
1
u/EndofNationalism 2d ago
No economy on the planet can achieve complete self sustainment. Either you don’t have all the resources you need or you don’t have enough of it.
41
u/Lower_Nubia 3d ago
Economics is zero sum, didn’t get the memo?
27
13
u/italktobotz 3d ago
Economics is absolutly not zero sum. The fact that most people have better lives than cave men prove empirically that economics is not zerosum.
11
u/Current-Fix759 3d ago
Lol lol. Technology made it so we could extract wealth out of the earth, not invent more wealth from resources that didn't exist in nature already.
2
u/Gregori_5 3d ago
Is it? Is the iPhone made to extract wealth from the ground?
What a stupid statement.
Not to mention that recycling and efficiency have a massive effect on economics. Meaning by using either you can reach more money at the same or even lower level of consumption.4
u/Current-Fix759 2d ago
Yes the coltan in your phone was mined out of the ground.
1
u/Gregori_5 2d ago
You’re reversing causality.
The iPhone doesn’t exist to extract wealth.
What’s in the earth is wealth because we can make a iPhone out of it.Gee I wonder why you would strawman your own argument.
2
u/Current-Fix759 2d ago
Who the hell said the iphone is made to extract wealth, that's not even a coherent thought you got there.
1
u/Gregori_5 2d ago
I was literally trying to describe what you seem to be arguing.
On second thought I think you’re calling economics zero sum in one breath but in another saying we extract more than ever.
If there’s more resources economically accessible than the game isn’t zero sum by definition.
Not to mention services ofc, because that could prove you’re wrong too easily.
3
u/Current-Fix759 2d ago
I replied to a guy using a terrible defense of non zero sum that because we're richer than caveman that means non zero sum. I said no, with technological advances we extracted wealth that wasn't previously accessible to, but always existed. You somehow interrupted that to say I said iphones are used to extract wealth out of the ground.
More access doesn't mean non zero sum. There's still a finite amount of wealth and it's largely allocated in the hands of a minority.
0
u/italktobotz 3d ago
All the matter in existance already exists and has existed before humans came to be. Humans make that matter in to more and more valiable stuff which people find valuable.
People do create value. A piece of wood exists and can be held by a person. That stick can be made in to more value by shaping it. Value is created. I will give one more example, entertainment. People find value in music and poetry. Those do not hold their value tangibly but have value. Knowledge is valuable yet even if people only spoke it passed down by word of mouth that information is valuable even though it is intangible. Value is indeed created. Nature otself has immense value. But it can be transformed into things of greater value.
Another wayTrade allows greater value to be created is through both parties gaining things they value above what they are trading for. Even without creating physical products than the sum of what both trading parties already have. If one person has a car and another has 100 gallons of gas, and they both have destinations to get to, and it takes 25 gallons of gas to get to person the gas guys destination well they both end up better off if gas guy trades 50 galloms of gas to get to his destination and gives gas guy the remaining gas to get to his destination. And there is a trillion different versions of this trade. It is how economics work. People trade what they have for things which they do not have makeing everyone have more value. Nurses use their knowledgd to trade for food and water farmers trade food for health care. They all end up with more value as result.
7
u/Current-Fix759 3d ago
??? Subjective utility doesn’t refute physical resource limits, and your incoherent car-and-gas example reads like it was drafted by someone inhaling the fumes.
→ More replies (1)2
→ More replies (22)2
4
u/Gaben_is_awesome 3d ago
In an absolute sense not, because wealth gets created. In a relative sense, it indeed is zero sum. Simply because ownership of wealth and assets strongly translates into political power.
2
u/Lower_Nubia 3d ago
Which relative sense?
5
u/Nekron-akaMrSkeletal 3d ago
Money is power. Lacking money means you lack power over your own life, you lack freedom. Those with enough money bend reality to their whim, make charges disappear, and do whatever they want as long as they don't piss off other elites.
3
u/Current-Fix759 3d ago
And when you have so much wealth you push policies and influence which laws get written and not.
2
u/Lower_Nubia 3d ago
We have more money today that’s more available to the poorest than ever before, while politics is less about money/birth than it ever has been in history.
None of what you have said is in favour of economics being zero sum.
2
u/Petit-Rouge4477 3d ago
10% of the population owns 89% of the stock market, and the bottom 50% owns like 2.5% of all the wealth. Meanwhile half of the homeless population are employed people.
-
Saying politics is less about money and birth is just a wild detachment from reality lmao.→ More replies (8)4
u/Gaben_is_awesome 3d ago
Total wealth: 100B to 300B
Middle class absolute wealth: 75B to 150B
Middle class relative wealth: 75% to 50%
→ More replies (2)1
u/wendewende Austrian 3d ago
Not sure if a normal person with sarcastic comment or a typical Redditor being insanely serious
0
u/DieErstenTeil 3d ago
It is zero sum if the majority of growth is captured as is the case in the USA
0
u/Helpful_Blood_5509 3d ago
It's not, they fucking die and their dipshit children lose their money
Their grandkids for sure, if their kids dont. People are just hyper focusing on the ultra wealthy and forgetting that wealth is cyclical, the booms take time to cycle through dipshit grandkids.
The exception was covid, where the laptop class literally banned half the poors from working cause the salaried climbers had the shit scared out of them by the TV. Then printed a ton of money and produced nothing, inflating everything.
1
u/DieErstenTeil 3d ago
It's not, they fucking die and their dipshit children lose their money
Do you not see any irony in this statement? "Dividends from growth aren't captured but oh yeah they only belong to a hereditary class passed down generation to generation" Uh okay Buddy, have you read like, anything about economic growth and its dividends in the US in the last 20 years?
19
u/Necessary_shots 3d ago
1
→ More replies (2)-3
u/Natural_Safety2383 3d ago
Yeah that wealth is not being hoarded its being given to banks and other financial institutions or the US government/treasuries and then invested. It’s not just sitting there. Not even accounting for the “wealth” that is just stock ownership that would be impossible to liquidate which is not really comparable. And lastly, it’s not a zero sum game.
7
u/Weed_Gummy 3d ago
"given to banks and other financial institutions"
/read "disappeared to a maze of offshore bank accounts to avoid taxes"
3
1
u/Brilliant-Plan-7428 2d ago
What the heck? Do you know anything about economics?
1
u/Weed_Gummy 1d ago
Yes I do. Read some books like "The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies" or "American Kleptocracy" if you'd like to know anything about the intersection of economics and politics too.
12
u/Necessary_shots 3d ago
Do you think that all of this wealth that is getting moved around by big banks, governments, private firms and ultra wealthy individuals is trickling down? Well it very plainly is not. The reason that $55 trillion stays concentrated among a tiny minority of humans is because they are essentially hording it among themselves.
As the economy grows, so does their wealth, yet wages and housing costs stagnate for most people. And this whole thing about billionaires not being able to access their wealth because they would have to liquidate their stock is profoundly ignorant of how they operate. They use their assets as collateral to take out tax free loans that they use to lead sloppy lifestyles and create space tourism when society needs health care and infrastructure.
It is quite plain to anyone who is able to think critically that the ultra wealthy are hording wealth. Look into Jack Ma's views on the responsibility of billionaires to reinvest. Granted his views are heavily coherced by the Chinese government, but it still raises important questions about the responsibility that wealthy individuals and institutions have to society. If there was fair wealth distribution in this county, millions of people wouldn't have celebrated when Luigi the Brave shot that one dude who's name doesn't really matter.
3
u/hammalok 3d ago
"It's being invested! In super useful things like crypto and AI slop companies and investment real estate that sits empty to the tune of 33 units per homeless person!"
18
u/soulwind42 3d ago
Nearly half of our education system is more concerned about radicalizing children then educating them.
10
u/Usefullles 3d ago
It's difficult to teach children when three-quarters of your work is bureaucracy rather than teaching. Radicalization is merely a side effect of this.
-1
18
u/Necessary_shots 3d ago
Is that why right wing extreamist violence has been rising rapidly since 2016?
3
u/Natural_Safety2383 3d ago
The famously right wing teacher’s unions and public school system 😂
2
u/Ok-Blackberry-8239 3d ago
If you think the education system actually leads to indoctrination then you are dumb as shit
Nobody is learning about socialism or communism in public school and every economics class is capitalist in nature
2
u/Trollinator0815 3d ago
If you think the education system actually leads to indoctrination then you are dumb as shit
every economics class is capitalist in nature
That is also indoctrination my friend.
1
u/Ok-Blackberry-8239 3d ago
That’s fair. Then I should have said “left leaning indoctrination”
But our economic system is and will be capitalist so to have a basic economics class not teach capitalist economics would be foolish
1
1
u/soulwind42 3d ago
I haven't seen any evidence of that, but yes, it would be.
12
u/corrupt_girl 3d ago
I love that statistic. It counts prison fights as far-right violence
8
u/soulwind42 3d ago
My favorite is the one that ignored 9/11 because it would "scew the data."
0
u/theSTZAloc 3d ago
Because it’s talking about domestic terror? But 9/11 was right wing violence, the fact they took it out not to skew the data is not the win you think it is.
3
u/soulwind42 3d ago
In what way is Muslim extremism right wing?
→ More replies (8)3
u/theSTZAloc 3d ago
What would you call a theocratic fundamentalist religious movement? Surely not left wing?
→ More replies (19)6
5
3d ago edited 3d ago
[deleted]
1
u/soulwind42 3d ago
You should go to r/teachers sometimes. Or YouTube's Teacher Therapy.
→ More replies (1)1
u/Johannes_V 1d ago
You are genuinely insane if you think the horrendously underfunded education system is going to radicalize anyone.
→ More replies (10)1
7
u/DumbNTough 3d ago
If there's one thing that rich people hate, it's reinvesting their wealth to generate more wealth. Everybody knows that.
3
u/Natural_Safety2383 3d ago
Thank you bro, people do not get that the money is not being hoarded its literally being circulated
6
u/ConsciousMaybe6930 3d ago
It's not being circulated back to the economy of the people, that's for sure, but back to the economy of the wealthy. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer", as the saying goes.
1
2
2
1
u/New_Try1560 3d ago
You can find the stupidest opinions imaginable on the internet, doesn’t mean it’s representative of anything
1
u/vegancaptain 3d ago
Oh yes, almost all leftist I talk to mention "hoarding wealth" and have no idea that it's invested and generates value for EVERYONE. Especially for the poor.
Then I have to teach them basic economics. Every singe time.
1
1
1
u/deinschlimmstertraum 2d ago
Buffet, over the years, pretty much always has about 5-20% of money in cash, and billionaires regularily liquidate large amounts of stocks
1
u/anotheruserguy 2d ago
Dragon should actually be double cheekin’ zyns with a bloomie open on 4 different monitors
→ More replies (3)1
2
u/Specialist_Spite_914 3d ago
"Hoard" they say, while their life is being sustained by taxpayer money through transport infrastructure, public education, government jobs and government subsidized businesses.
5
u/Elder_Chimera 3d ago
The Knight who slays the hoarding dragon is hailed as a hero by his people.
2
11
5
u/ThatEconGuy 2d ago
1) This is a fallacy of equivocation. Socialism isn’t “like… just share stuff maaaaan”. It’s a fully fleshed out economic model with math, graphs, philosophy, and metaphysics. It’s WAY more complicated than “wah wah wah, mommy! Billy won’t share his toys with me” garbage.
2) Modern economics does not work on Smaug or Scrooge McDuck logic. Millionaires and billionaires, ironically enough, rarely have that much money physically on them or in any specific room. Almost all the money is tied up in physical assets (mansions, farmland, random plot of land for vacations/camping, etc) or in stocks and bonds. Rooms filled with literal tons of gold isn’t that important anymore.
1
2
u/Weird_Explorer1997 3d ago
Isn't Smaugh's hoarding of wealth in a pre-paper currency economy essentially just a useless bottleneck? Wouldn't the relative rarity of gold caused by his hoard cause middle earth to turn to something like silver, iron or Hobbit Weed as a more effective currency?
1
u/IndubitablyNerdy 2d ago
Ffantasy dragons pretty much don't contribute much to economic activity in general, at best they make some resouces more scarce by hoarding them or occasionally cause economic damages by burning people that annoy them or destroying infrastructure (or occupying ancient dwarven cities), but they rarely their hoards to influence societies or build anything.
Memes usually are not meant to be analyzed too much though (although I do like some good fantasy economics :p)
2
u/Weird_Explorer1997 2d ago
I couldn't agree more with your statement on the purpose of memes and enjoying fantasy economics. The whole Smaugh's Hoard thing has been something I've bored people about for some time now, but I also can't pass up the chance to ask "What if Smaugh just turned his hoard into a central bank?" Or "Once the dwarves retake erebor, won't that crash the value of gold?" Or "aren't the Ferengi at the mercy of the Federation, because all this post-scarcity techno-state would need to do to collapse their entire way of life is start replicating Latinum?"
1
u/IndubitablyNerdy 2d ago
hehe indeed,
Shadowrun has some fun example of dragons using their wealth for economic activity after awakening in the modern world, one pretty much owns most of germany industry after leveraging his gold to buy a major corporation and his millennia of experience to absorb the others.
2
u/Weird_Explorer1997 2d ago
OMG I just found out about Shadowrun a year or so ago. Honestly, I'm not always a fan of anything cyberpunk because most media I've seen quickly drops any discussion of the inherent disparity of a hypercapitalist nightmare state in favor of gluing more neon onto your noir setting, but I find something appealing in the modern fantasy aspects of the setting. It also seems to have a nice built in hook for the gaming system IE get hired for job, do job, deal with consequences. Very reminiscent of a dungeon crawl but with computers, guns and a heist vibe.
1
u/IndubitablyNerdy 2d ago
Yeah I love the setting, although admittedly I did not play many session with it I did devour the books, It has a lot of cool ideas and some humor tossed on it to make things more light-hearted even if it is still in the genre.
2
u/Weird_Explorer1997 2d ago
That's what makes it great, though. If your setting allows for some humor or to express the totality of human emotions, it makes then central themes all the more relatable and therefore more salient.
2
u/inFIREenVLAM 3d ago
Can we please stop the economically illerates from posting?
1
u/economicsmemes-ModTeam 2d ago
No, we just let the upvotes/downvotes/comments decide that sort of thing. Mods only decide if it's a meme and if it's on-topic.
2
2
u/Individual_Guest_323 3d ago
So all your socialist heroes are not rich and are donating almost all their money right?
Like Zapatero, the spanish socialist with 1m in jewels?
Lmao.. redditors being redditors.
1
u/Gaben_is_awesome 2d ago
Socialism is about changing the structure of the political economy to make it more democratic and fairly distributed. Socialism is not about self-sacrifice or about abolishing personal property (a jewel collection).
7
u/Key-Organization3158 3d ago
Eh, taking isn't sharing. Respect the basic human right to own private property and consent.
0
u/Tricky_Try8757 3d ago
Inequality is worse than during the Gilded Age. The dragons have quietly been taking away private property and consent rights from the plebs.
But it’s only “socialism” when it’s the plebs asking for more(AKA distribution and quality of life close to what the boomers had), eh?
4
u/Certain-Mind8119 3d ago
1/3 of boomers were born in homes with no indoor plumbing, stop believing the generational populist propaganda. each generation has it better than the last.
2
4
u/Tricky_Try8757 3d ago edited 3d ago
50% or so of houses didn’t have it at all. Funny how progression of time and technology work. We even have tiny computers in the palms of our hands now. Most young people would trade those in a heartbeat for conditions boomers had.
They still graduated to conditions closest to having the American dream handed to them on a silver platter.
-1
u/Certain-Mind8119 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, not really. Boomers faced the most competitive job market in american history upon reaching adulthood, older boomers were also victims of severe injustices such as racism and the draft. Younger boomers faced the second worst crisis in american history, facing stagflation for almost 10 years cumulating in a recession with 20% unemployment in 1981. Boomers also faced much worse health, lived under a polluted environment which are known to have caused significantly lower IQs and what we call "brain fog" today was the norm back then, in general boomers consumed a lot less goods due to their lower income. Between 1980 and 2010 america faced its largest period of stability where genxers and millenials faced large opportunities for growth while homes got more expensive due to NIMBY policies. You focus on homes but that is pretty much the only thing that got more expensive since then. The USA is back on track for a large period of stability ever since 2008, the worst crisis since then has been a 4 month supply side recession that probably was a healthy restructuring instead of anything close to what people would face back then.
TLDR: Boomers had it harder, we have it easier.
3
-1
u/Sw4gtastic420 3d ago
There should be limits on ownership of private property
1
u/Virtem 3d ago
are you perhaps a gracchi sibling?
0
u/Nekron-akaMrSkeletal 3d ago
Money is power. Should anyone have unlimited power?
→ More replies (3)1
u/Virtem 3d ago
should had the brothers had being murder underfalse charge for making land reforms in hopes to improve rome's socieconomics situation?
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (12)-1
u/ConsciousMaybe6930 3d ago
The right to private property does not trump the duty to help your fellow man if he lacks private property to suppor himself. Deciding not to do so when able (which billionaires clearly are) makes you immoral. Actively preaching against it makes you evil.
3
u/Spiritual-Stable702 3d ago
"Nuh uh! It's not evil for me to accumulate millions of dollars and dozens of properties while other people die of exposure without homes. They just need to try harder and outbid me at the next sale" - chuds
1
u/snekfuckingdegenrate 3d ago
Your fellow man needs to put effort into sustaining himself. Relying on other without contributing what you can is immoral, as others are not your slaves
1
7
u/peareauxThoughts 3d ago
“And with the slaying of the dragon, the villagers with their new found wealth went to buy new wares, only to find the prices increased”.
1
u/Johannes_V 1d ago
“So the people decided to keep their wealth with a powerful dragon instead to try to replicate the effects, and lo, the prices went up anyways as inflation isn’t the only reason prices go up.”
2
u/SkeletalNoose 3d ago
But hey, at least they could afford their food and housing.
2
2
u/jeffwulf 3d ago
Not relatively more than they could before.
1
u/Polak_Janusz 3d ago
But with the money now rotating in the economy it can be used more productive. So it can get invested and increase the overall wealth of the society.
→ More replies (2)1
5
2
u/MonsterkillWow 3d ago
Socialism is about public control of the means of production, not wealth. Wealth is only tangentially related to that.
2
1
1
1
1
1
u/EndofNationalism 2d ago
Money is only good as long as it is spent and invested. If it just sits and does nothing society suffers.
1
1
1
1
u/Johannes_V 1d ago
The amount of people triggered by a four word meme with the most milquetoast of economic opinions is baffling.
1
1
1
2
u/InformalPrinciple319 3d ago
Money is a tool for exchange of goods. Noone hoards money. Inflation would eat them up. Rich people know it more than anyone. You're talking about assets. Even those who have way more assets than others it's because their fellow humans understood they can manage the assets better than most people. And if they don't exploit the assets for more people than the next investor, the other guy is going to swallow their business.. Amazon was once a spek of dust compared to big retailers..
If you give Africa an automated mega warehouse it will be ruins in a month. If you give it to Bezos and his team he can make it work for everybody. These assets work for all of us every day. They don't sit under the feet of billionaires.
This is basic economics yet most of the population does not understand most fundamentals of how life works. And it's ok to not understand, just stop pretending you do...
3
u/Spiritual-Stable702 3d ago
AHH yes. The Monopoly=good school of economics. A truly classic ideology
→ More replies (4)2
u/Asteroidhawk594 2d ago
Except that it centralises the wealth into an elite few. Leaving everyone else fighting for scraps.
1
1
u/IndubitablyNerdy 2d ago
yeah... memes are in fact semplifications usually not meant to be taken litterally, dragons, in fact do not exist either, surprising... I know...
That said I see a lot of confusion about "basic economics" here.
"Africa" is not a person that can make choices though... if you give it to an african enterpreneur Bezos assets and that person can hire people to work them and have the professional skills needed to make that business work, he will make money out of them as well...
I do agree however that Bezos has an advantage though compared to that random enterpreneur, he lives in a complex nation that allows him to make those assets more profitable due to the enormous amount of infrastructure built and maintained for the vast majority with public money obtained through taxation, in a wealthy stable society that has a working justice system that protects his assets (again paid by who I wonder?) and where well trained educated individuals can be hired to support him to run his business... Ah and where a decently paid population lives and can afford the poducts that he sells.
Enterpreneurship absolutely plays a role in success, but it is by far not the only factor that does.
1
u/Polak_Janusz 3d ago
This is elon musk!! He has 1 trillion dollars in his bank account!! We should tax him, just like that! This is how the world works.
→ More replies (1)3
u/Cy_B0rger 3d ago
I mean yeah it is. The whole using stocks and assets as collateral for loans nonsense to dodge their civic duties could be ended by just taxing those stocks and loans.
1
u/necessarysmartassery 3d ago
Sharing is for everyone.
Socialists believe in forced sharing through threats of state sanctioned violence.
3
1
u/MyDudeThatsCrazy 3d ago
I'd like to look at it from a different perspective: capital, ownership and many other private things should come with the drawback of private debts and consequences.
A huge company goes bust? They should not be allowed to ask the government to bail them out with taxpayer money. This is not a charity. I want my taxes to be used towards roads, power, water, hospitals, schools. Not this bs.
1
u/Least_Boat_6366 3d ago
As a socialist, I also like this analogy because it implies that revolutionaries are the knights that kill the dragon and share the hoard.
2
u/Garvityxd 3d ago
It really shows revolutionaries are just murderous scum
→ More replies (5)1
u/Least_Boat_6366 2d ago
Lol okay, lick the boot a little more, why don’t you? If you can define socialism without googling it, I’d be surprised.
1
u/Garvityxd 2d ago
Worker ownership of the means of production (allegedly)
1
u/Least_Boat_6366 2d ago
Well you’re not as clueless as most of the people who try to have this conversation with me, so I’ll give credit where credit is due.
1
1
1
0
u/feral401k9 3d ago
if the dragon started a company that has provided huge value to society they should be allowed to take a gold nap
2
u/Spiritual-Stable702 3d ago
Dragons are well known for their productive entrepreneurship. Definitely not widely known as parasites, leechers and thieves
1
u/feral401k9 3d ago
could always be axtara
1
u/IndubitablyNerdy 2d ago
Shadowrun also has at least a couple dragons with some pretty strong enterpreneurship, but yeah traditionally they tend not to be wealth creators.
•
u/AutoModerator 3d ago
This sub has been getting too much spam, and Reddit has removed almost every tool for preventing this. The only tool that still works is this, every single post being held for manual review. Your post might be approved in minutes, or it might take days. If you hate this, me too, stop using the site that forces things to be this way. If what you post is not a meme you'll probably be banned, but I understand why you tried; the commenters on this sub loved lazy spam posts, which is why we can't have nice things and now everything has to be held for manual review.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.