Nate Cull (.social)Apr 14, 2017

A reason I'm not a hugely political activist is that I feel quite conflicted about the fundamental political principles of both today's Left and Right.

Like, I feel I deeply get Marx and Piketty's critique of capital, that it accumulates and disempowers all but a few. I've seen that happen before my eyes over the life of the Internet.

But also I get the capitalist's desire for personal freedom, to have something YOU own and can make better.

What I don't agree with is owning people's labour.

Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 14, 2017
And that gets complicated, because a small managerial class directing other people's labour is something both 'capitalist' and 'socialist' models of production settled on in the Cold War. It also pre-dated capitalism, in the form of kings and emperors. It's how science and education and the military run. And I kind of think it's wrong! But.. How *do* you get things done, if someone doesn't have (via money or aristocracy or peer-review) the right to boss others?
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 14, 2017

Also, a big crisis right now - one that's very clearly zero-sum, defying the conventional economic wisdom of the 1990s - is house prices, which is good old land. Not even labour. And I like homeowners being free to land! I just don't like that, now, they actually can't because the prices are too high.

At some point "economic freedom" became "economic non-freedom" without the economic system actually changing.

I don't have an answer. I just know something's wrong.

Show threadwill
@natecull the idea of land as an investment (cash vehicle) instead of a place to live is core to this problem I think. Too much money chasing too few real things of value. It's more cost-effective to rent out a place you own on weekends to vacationers than to lease it to a permanent tenant. So you are incentivized to let it sit empty 5 days out of 7.
Apr 14, 2017 at 5:55amWeb