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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?
If feels almost like a truism, when it comes to 'free market' economies, that assets/wealth and money will tend to flow to those who are best suited to manage them productively, and away from those who aren't.
The guy who takes out a mortgage on his house to go to the Casino and bet it all on black might win some % of the time, but on average, over the long run, he'll lose his money, the house gets foreclosed and sold, and thus both his money and his house get shuffled off to somebody who will be better at managing them productively.
So it isn't inherently surprising that families with the discipline and patience to accumulate wealth over time will generally maintain that wealth whilst others that don't have such time preference will probably bleed wealth and never have a point in time where their accumulated wealth outstrips their overall consumption.
But if your wealth is all dependent on holding assets and earning 'passive' income that is downstream of some other productive activity, you are actually absorbing quite a bit of risk that those assets/income sources could unexpectedly go to zero. Or possibly worse, go negative. This is what happens to banks that make too many bad loans. ON PAPER they've got thousands of income streams and 'assets' worth millions. But too many of those go into default, the books become unbalanced, and people get antsy and you can see a bank run happen real quick.
There are obvious steps you can take to mitigate risk. Own homes that are geographically dispersed so they won't all be impacted by the same natural disaster. But what do you do about black swans that cause the entire real estate market to come crashing down at once? There's never a 'foolproof' investment that doesn't present some downside risk, even if unseen.
The risk of living solely off your accumulated wealth is that said wealth is subject to fluctuations in economic conditions entirely beyond your control. And there's always a chance that you take a hit that you can't easily recover from.
Even if you have a doomsday bunker filled with gold bars, ammo, and stockpiled food, you still risk some other event happening that cuts off your access to it, rendering it valueless to you.
If you work for a living, you will always be able to earn money via your particular trade, unless that entire trade gets obsoleted, and even then you can retrain and keep rolling.
If you think you've accumulated enough wealth to immunize yourself from the need to work... perhaps you should think long and hard about what sort of events or series of events could wipe out that wealth hoard all at once.
Unless the financial managerial class all gets together and decides to create an asset bubble through legal and financial trickery, so they never have to pay the piper. Which is essentially what has been happening the last couple decades.
Right, and that would be a departure from "free market" economies, in my mind.
So very valid to identify it as an issue, but the deeper question of "why do some people have to work for a living and other people manage to accumulate enough wealth to escape the rat race" is pretty well answered by
"some people are more patient, disciplined, and better at identifying financial opportunities/avoiding financial traps, wealth will tend to flow to these people."
I have no issue with people retiring after truly contributing to society. That being said, the market economy we have set up absolutely does not reward virtue or truly giving back to society. In many cases I think that most of the rich nowadays make their fortunes by dumping massive negative externalities on the rest of society.
That is one aspect of why it is unjust.
I would like you to give a specific example of somebody who has gotten rich in such a way that they have dumped 'externalizes' on the rest of society that weren't made up for by the immense value that was also provided by their activities.
I don't know about rewarding 'virtue' but as a broad, general rule, anyone who made billions of dollars in the U.S. did so by creating a business which convinced millions of people to hand over money voluntarily.
And if you convince millions of people to hand over money... then almost by definition there is a HUGE societal benefit being accrued.
Just because your preferences aren't necessarily maximized doesn't mean that the preferences of society aren't well reflected by the economy they live in.
Sure. Steve Jobs is an excellent example. Often hailed as a hero of the technocratic class, I’m firmly of the belief that the smartphone is the single most disastrous invention of the last 50 years.
I can be sympathetic to that view, although I'd say social media is the real problem there.
But I don't see how you can suggest that smartphones, and the ability to have a computer with access to the near-sum of total human knowledge, hasn't been a boon for mankind in general, creating tons of value across the planet.
I might prefer to live in a world where Social Media was banned or never invented, wouldn't say the same for smartphones in general.
Smart phones are super stimuli that destroy physical, real time human connection. Which has been shown time and time again to be one of the most important predictors of human health and happiness.
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