By this logic neither the Troubles nor the Irish Civil War would never have occurred in the first place. Yet they did.

(And the latter was more fierce than the war that forced London to acknowledge the Republic's independence.)

Think about it... I steal all of someones money and promise to pay them back later and they're just going to be nice about it? If this happened to a person... likely he will hunt me down and "extract" the money out of me through any means available.

Why? because typically survival depends on a persons' ability to spend money.

I am not bloodthirsty. Theft in any society typically results in extreme measures of punishment including forcefully kidnapping people and confining them in inhumane conditions (it's called prison). Additionally, when the "theft" involves survival, getting violent is a normal thing. This is not just a "totalitarian" measure.

What's going on here seems to be a social phenomenon because theft and a sketchy promise of repayment is essentially what happened. The only reason why the system remained stable was because people still accepted checks.

I mean would you accept an IOU as payment if you know the issuer essentially stole the money and won't return it when asked for it? Typically no.

That said, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, Ireland in 1970 certainly did have other forms of discrimination which would’ve been much more relevant here.

Though of course the modern problem isn't that there is only one bank, it's that there is only one bank regulator which subjects all of the banks to the same incentives, and if those rule you out you're effectively prohibited from using a bank in another jurisdiction with different rules.

What you need for this is something permissionless.

You can’t do foreign exchange at a bank or credit union anymore without an account.

Yes, but we've never had that: pubs don't do banking under normal circumstances because they're outcompeted by the banks.

> If you want a permissionless money transfer system that anybody can use and nobody can be refused, why shouldn't that exist too?

I don't have a big objection to a parallel informal payment system. OTOH, these kinds of systems tend to have the problems that all the reddit alternatives have: they capture the least attractive and most problematic business because they only end up employed by an unusual subset of people.

I guess the closest analog we have of what you describe at scale is hawala.

But there's a key difference. They don't need to continue to sell their labor, they can stop at any time and live on e.g. income from dividends. Or maybe they have enough cash they could literally not even invest it and still live fine.

Although they may not own the means of production right at this moment, they easily could at any moment, it's a choice.

I think creating a hierarchy of managers and workers is just another tool that the people with power use to control everyone else.

Surely my direct manager has more in common with me than the CEO? Am I wrong to think this? Wouldn't the CEO see both managers and their teams as mere workers?

Major actors are really leveraging a brand not just selling their labor. Athletes have a similar dynamic where the very best compensated are making more from endorsements than playing football. And of course the richest examples all end up investing well.

They literally own the means of production, their bodies and minds. No one is forcing them to sign contracts for a million dollar salary, they can do the exact same acting/athelete-ing with a $100 smartphone.

And so many people just don't understand that there's really 4 classes: poverty, able to live, owner/landlord, royalty. (The USA has the politician class in place of royalty.)

Note I didn't say "middle class". That term originally was the constructed 'rich merchant non-royalty" class that was founded out of mercantilism into capitalism. The Middle Class is now the landlord and managerial class for most of the western countries.

But back to the topic, a Starbucks worker, a IT worker, a sex worker, and a MD all must sell their time and body to live. It's only when you start buying others labor/property cheaply and selling it expensively do you become a capitalist. Anything else, and youre just in the labor class.

If the means of production is now a livelihood, I have to say that this is a great example of how "means of production" is an insufficiently-precise phrase. It means all things to all people.

Marx seeing his mate's factory and thinking "it'd be nice if the workers owned that" and coming up with a generic-sounding equivalent phrase isn't really good enough to define a real concept.

Which is why people who use the phrase "means of production" seem to all mean different things. Owning a hammer is owning the means of production. It's just the means of production isn't enough.

This promotes new construction. Not as well as zoning reform, but it does. Which lowers the rent (or at least makes it go up less fast).

> And landlords are usually smaller, but again, they're another reason why housing is stupid priced: it's common to see a rental of a home priced at mortgage+30% .

Well of course they are. The landlord is taking on the maintenance of the property, insurance, the risk of a housing crash (look at housing prices FFS), the risk of a vacancy or destructive or non-paying tenant, legal expenses associated with operating a business etc. And on top of that, they have to pay the mortgage.

They do turn a profit, because of course they do, why else would they do it? And with that they slowly buy the property from the bank, at which point the interest on the value of the property goes to the landlord instead of the bank, the same as it would if they sold the property and invested the money in something else.

The problem with landlords is not that they turn a profit -- they always will or they'd sell the property instead.

It's that they lobby for zoning restrictions that limit the housing supply to increase rents. But homeowners do the same thing, to the detriment of both renters and prospective homeowners.

If they're making skilled capital-allocation decisions that most people couldn't, that's work. If they're being charitable in the allocation of their ill-gotten gains, that doesn't make them any less ill-gotten.

Rentiers inherently make their money in a zero-sum way; it's perhaps not the only way to be zero-sum, but it is a major one.

Why do you think that in American continent we had slave labor? How do you convince someone to work in your land if the person is able to simply go and easily take for herself vacant land and produce for herself instead of producing for someone else and get a salary smaller than her production? Slavery was how you deal with the problem forcing people to work. Later (and usually before the enslaved people are freed), the land becomes a commodity and then nobody can so easily simply take land for herself.

That's anybody who has enough money that they don't have to work. It doesn't tell you anything about where they got it.

> You're begging the question - why was it your money in the first place?

What if you found it in the street? Would that affect whether or not the business you invest it in produces a net positive as a result?

> But if it's just privilege that you had, then you don't get any credit for allowing it to be used productively.

That doesn't seem right. You could have spent it on drugs and sex. Your choices matter.

> If you do something that produces real value in the world then that's positive sum - if you turn some planks and nails into a table, that table is more valuable than the stuff that went into it, the world is better off.

Suppose the planks are the status quo. You're getting paid $10/hour to make tables. Now you get a raise and get paid $12/hour to make tables, but you still only make exactly the same number of exactly the same tables as you did for $10/hour. The extra $2/hour is zero sum, isn't it? Why should you get it instead of the boss or the customer?

If being taller leads to better basketball that more people will enjoy watching, yes. I'm not convinced that sports leagues aren't a zero-sum blight, but certainly someone whose fortunate genetics mean they're genuinely producing more for society (e.g. a stronger porter who carries more stuff further, or a more intelligent scientist who does better research, or a singer with a beautiful voice who is more rewarding to listen to) deserves to reap at least some of the fruits of that.

> Labor being scarcer, on the other hand, is a perfect example. Some new large employer moves into town and your boss gives you a raise rather than see you quit and have to pay retraining costs for someone they'd still have to pay the extra $2 to. You haven't done anything different, why do you "deserve" any more money?

Because what you're doing - and it's something you're actually doing, not something you happen to be holding - is worth more. The price of labour is going up because the amount of real-world value produced per hour of labour is going up.

> And yet, even by paying you the extra $2, the boss is still receiving a net benefit from operating the business, as were you when you were working for the original wage. Changing the amount is zero sum, but the activity it's compensating isn't, so how do you want to call it?

Either the value produced is being divided fairly among those who are producing it, or it isn't. Someone who is producing value might certainly be getting paid more (or more commonly less) than they are fairly earning, and that part is zero-sum. But if someone isn't producing value, then necessarily all of their income is from the zero-sum part.

(Obviously if we zoom in on the details there's a spectrum - some labourers earn more than they should through rentiering aspects, and even those who live large off of economic rents are likely doing some minimal amount of productive labour. But I suspect the distribution is pretty bimodal)