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Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.
I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).
The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)
The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.
All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.
I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?
You already answered your own question: don't self-sabotage and you can just be fucking set. Maybe the question you're asking is how to solve people self-sabotaging
Well, that doesn't solve the problem - the emergence of a semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy. Personally I'm inclined to say that this sort of thing is possibly unavoidable in any kind of complex economy with a free market and for various reasons our economy wouldn't allow too many people to do this.
Ah! I'm with you now. How do we get more people/everyone into the leisure aristocracy? It seems like (until 50 years ago or so) this had been solving itself, you're never going to get everyone in (because of self-sabotage), but that class had been expanding wildly.
How do you curb the excesses of the (pick a word really) illegitimate leisure aristocracy? Tax the shit out of it. We know taxes discourage behavior so, off the top of my head example, you get 6 houses property tax free but house #7 is taxed at something unfathomable like 10% a year. This will create other problems of course (people buying all of their relatives exactly 6 houses, what is a house, etc) but 99.9% of us are on the same team on this one and that or something similar would theoretically drive investment away from property.
The only person I ever knew with more than 6 houses (I think he had 9) wasn't particularly wealthy and certainly wasn't "leisure aristocracy". He was a landlord who did a large part of his own maintenance and still had a salaried job.
Yeah, that's another gnarly problem. I know someone similar who owned a dozen or so quadplexes and died quite young from the stress. How about a combo law, either 6 properties or $10 million value combined, whichever is last?
How about not trying to use the tax code to micromanage people's lifestyles?
How about offering solutions in addition to criticisms?
It hasn't even been established that either this "semi permanent rentier/leisure aristocracy" exists or that if it does, that it's a problem needing solving. Instead, the spectre of it is being used to push for more punitive taxation (which, as it happens, will generally fall not only or even mainly on these 'leisure aristocrats')
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