Yes, anything you buy or own is a product of someone's labour. Economic systems need to be designed around this fact, it can't be hidden forever. When there's a shortage of labour there will be a shortage of products, full stop. Yet the system pretends that we can all just do nothing and live on saved money.
> Yes, anything you buy or own is a product of someone's labour.
That's not strictly true but I digress
> Economic systems need to be designed around this fact, it can't be hidden forever. When there's a shortage of labour there will be a shortage of products, full stop. Yet the system pretends that we can all just do nothing and live on saved money.
Well I think in the case of markets they are actually designed around that fact. That's why we invented things like coinage and banks. If there's a labor shortage there isn't necessarily a shortage of products, that's a misunderstanding of economics. If there's a labor shortage we either raise prices to reflect the change in availability (or conversely we lower them), or we automate. The system as it exists today allows you to transform your labor into other productive uses. When you're old your labor probably isn't very productive, in a manner of speaking capital markets allow you to save that labor in a way that you can use later via dividends, stock investments, bonds, things like that.
> > Yes, anything you buy or own is a product of someone's labour.
> That's not strictly true but I digress
How is it not true?
> When you're old your labor probably isn't very productive, in a manner of speaking capital markets allow you to save that labor in a way that you can use later via dividends, stock investments, bonds, things like that.
This requires disposable income, a luxury that is getting icnreasingly scarce.
We live in a society that allows medical bankruptcy to exist. That's a choice.
Well the easiest way to know it's not true is you can walk outside and pick up a stick and now you own a stick and nobody else's labor went into it.
But you also seem to be implying this is a bad thing. It's not. It's a good thing. You don't want to have to do everything from building your house to growing your own food only by yourself. That's why we invented society, cooperation, civilization and free market capitalism, because doing that stuff on your own sucks, leads to early death, and keeps us from being able to do things like invent products to help other people see or something.
> This requires disposable income, a luxury that is getting icnreasingly scarce. We live in a society that allows medical bankruptcy to exist. That's a choice.
We also live in a society that allows people to write gambling losses off on their taxes, and allows crazy people to do drugs next to libraries. I'm not following your point unless it's a general complaint? What does this have to do with the topic at hand though?
You seem to want to nitpick on a comment about 401ks and other savings accounts but that was a point made in the context of reasons people have or don't have children. It's probably best to stay on topic here.
Capitalist markets do not allow you to store labour. Instead they allow you to exchange labour in one time period for labour in another, usually at a rate that's favourable to the earlier period, Ponzi-style. Also like Ponzi, the whole thing collapses once the amount of labour that's owed in a time period exceeds the amount that's actually available.
