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Woozle Hypertwin
@woozle@toot.cat  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

A point I'd like to see discussed more, especially with people who are fans of capitalism:

Economic inequality makes money less useful.

My thinking: as inequality gets increasingly extreme, customer-facing vendors are increasingly motivated to price their offerings to appeal to the higher end of that range -- sacrificing quantity of sales for overall increase in profit.

The more this happens, the fewer people have enough discretionary spending money left over -- or, indeed, enough to live on.

Survival (and even prosperity) then becomes less about money and more about establishing supportive community (a mix of barter and localized socialism).

Take-away: #UBI is the only way to save #capitalism.

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Riley S. Faelan
@riley@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle In a more physics-based model, one could say that a sustained income inequality forms an event horizon, a surface through which money flows in only one direction, and never returns, even though the gravity of its accumulation warps the moneyspacetime at an increasing rate.

And once there's a sustained gradient of various money densities around a moneyspacetime's black hole (who, strangely, is usually a white arsehole), the same forces that drive different species of animals to optmise for different ecological niches entice different market actors to specialise on different layers of the money's flow into the sillionaire's coffins.

This fragments markets, and reduces its utility as the immoral price discovery mechanism that Smith and Bentham envisioned.

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Woozle Hypertwin
@woozle@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@riley I seem to recall that if you translate "black hole" literally into Russian, it's considered obscene...
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Riley S. Faelan
@riley@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago

@woozle I don't know enough about Russian obscenities to be able to directly confirm or deny it, but the astronomical phenomena apparently go by 'дыра', which is kind of the sort of hole that a Hobbit might build a luxurious home into. Using such an unusual word could be because a more common translation of English 'hole' was, indeed, considered offensive.

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Misuse Case
@MisuseCase@twit.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle I’ve seen signs that this is already happening. Apparently the U.S. economy is propped up by the top 1/5 quintile of earners/wealth holders at this point.
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anubis2814
@anubis2814@friendica.myportal.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle Yup. That or just turn every corporation into a worker owned coop, and take all money away from the rich. I'm favoring my idea, but at this point, I'll take yours too.
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AKingsbury
@AlexanderKingsbury@mastodon.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle

Except that's not something we see play out. Sure, some people print the name of their company on a brick and sell it to an idiot for $10K. But there are still many, MANY vendors and manufacturers who target the "lower end" of the socioeconomic ladder, including some of the biggest companies.

Which US company pulls in the most revenue? Not Amazon; it's Walmart. Do you think they're pricing their offerings for the "high end" of the range?

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RD
@RD4Anarchy@kolektiva.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@AlexanderKingsbury @woozle

Ah yes, Walmart, a splendid example of your beloved "Free Market Capitalism (TM)" 🤣

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prau
@prau@social.vivaldi.net replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle

UBI is the sure way to kill an economy.

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Woozle Hypertwin
@woozle@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@prau Explain? Examples?
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prau
@prau@social.vivaldi.net replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle

Read this please https://mises.org/online-book/new-liberty-libertarian-manifesto/chapter-8-welfare-and-welfare-state/negative-income-tax

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Woozle Hypertwin
@woozle@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@prau I should have expected that, having encountered it many times before from Mises fans.

Please summarize whatever portion of the argument in that essay is applicable to your point.

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imdat celeste :v_tg: :v_nb: :v_genderfluid: [witchzard]
@ics@tau-ceti.space replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle @prau Don't expect a capitalist swine to give you an answer, but I looked into that link and I can tell you that all you need to read is this section:

[…]

The one element that saves the present welfare system from being an utter disaster is precisely the red tape and the stigma involved in going on welfare. The welfare recipient still bears a psychic stigma, even though weakened in recent years, and he still has to face a typically inefficient, impersonal, and tangled bureaucracy. But the guaranteed annual income, precisely by making the dole efficient, easy, and automatic, will remove the major obstacles, the major disincentives, to the “supply function” for welfare, and will lead to a massive flocking to the guaranteed dole. Moreover, everyone will now consider the new dole as an automatic “right” rather than as a privilege or gift, and all stigma will be removed.

[…]

This sections makes it clear whose brainchild that fucking shitcollection of letters and sentences is: capitalist, pseudo-darwinist assholes.

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prau
@prau@social.vivaldi.net replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@ics @woozle

Live off #capitalism and hate it as much as you can and people will love you very much!

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Misuse Case
@MisuseCase@twit.social replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@woozle @prau Don’t bother, Vivaldi dot net (where this user is from) is chock full of fascists.
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Woozle Hypertwin
@woozle@toot.cat replied  ·  activity timestamp 2 months ago
@MisuseCase

Yeah, I'm familiar with the Mises people; I'm just curious what their response is to this particular point.

@prau

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