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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?
I'm not clear what the problem is. Do you feel that it's just viscerally unfair that some people need to work and some people don't? That people who have wealth should have it confiscated until they're in a position of needing to work again? I promise, I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. Designing policies with the goal of enabling anyone willing to work to have a reasonably decent life seems like a good starting point to me, but that doesn't suggest that there wouldn't be or shouldn't be capital-holders that have arrived at a position where personal labor is no longer necessary for them to draw their living. If the problem is the unsustainability of the rate of return on capital, tweaking some of the more audacious tax policies seems like a plausible approach, but I would need to know what exactly we're trying to fix and what the goal is before really undertaking a discussion of where to go.
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
How could you deny that this is viscerally unfair? Seems the most blatant example ever. Not that we know how to fix the problem, but damn it's unfair as hell.
I don't see how smart people working hard becoming rich not to have to work is unfair.
I think it's unfair, and that is me.
I didn't do anything to deserve a high enough IQ or a low compulsion to gamble or a lack of desire to alter my state of concious; that shit just happened to fall out that way.
If I sit here and say, "The cosmic hapenstance that alowes my pleasent life is fine and just" why can't someone say "the cosmic hapenstance of me shooting you in the head and taking you shit is also fine and just", bassicaly.
Because you actually do have control over whether you shoot someone in the head. The universe being deterministic doesn't change that.
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