You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, but I think it's pretty clear that when people say "free of government regulations" they generally mean markets free of a specific kind of regulation, namely the kind obliging anyone to buy or sell anything to anyone at any specific price. But not one free of regulations against force and fraud.

In that same vein though, I think those same people generally assume that it is also not free of government enforcement of artificially created obligations, i.e. contracts, and that's a possible point of contention. A system with maximal (to use Hohfeldian terminology) liberties and immunities is consequently one with minimal claims and powers, and while plenty of free-market advocates bang a loud drum against claims more than minimal negative claims, they seems pretty gung-ho on allowing pretty extensive arbitrary power to contract, which does not automatically come part and parcel with a system that allows only the minimal claim to property and the minimal power to trade. It's an extra thing added on top of that minimal free market system.

I think it's that power to contract where all the problems with capitalism (and many other social problems) creeps in, and though I mostly make a big noise about certain specific kinds of contracts being problematic (those involving rent and interest), I've half a mind to throw contracts out entirely. The deontological half of my mind, arguing from first principles at least; that would obviously have fairly far-reaching consequences and unlike eliminating just rent and interest, I don't quite have thorough solutions to all the problematic consequences already in mind, so deontological arguments be damned, I'm not quite sure it's a good idea just yet.

Not if we stop using force to enable that advantage. If we simply didn't enforce contracts of rent and interest, hoarding would become almost useless, because there would be no reliable way to extract value from those hoarded goods other than by selling them off proper (rather than lending them out), which would make them no longer hoarded. No need to stop people from accumulating; just need to stop enabling them to leverage that accumulation. They can still try if they want, but without enforcement of the agreements necessary to do that —and with standard laws against violence in place, to stop them from enforcing their own agreements — those efforts will depend entirely on the goodwill and trustworthiness of the people they're trying to take advantage of, and so not go very far. All by having government do less, not more.

I just realized you linked a different comic than I thought you had from your text. The one you actually linked is actually funny and not just the preachy bullshit he's been putting out lately. I retract that half of my comment.

And an outlier of the set "people" may likely find people in general to be stupidly really fucking dumb. Nobody ever said every single individual person is really fucking dumb.

That xkcd is just more of the recent bullshit Randall has started putting out lately. Comic is going downhill if you ask me.

I think it is a bad thing to have "rich" or "poor" when those are defined in terms of necessity to work and borrow. I think it's a bad thing to have people who are "poor" in that they have no choice but to borrow, and for other people who are "rich" in that they have the choice to not work, at the expense of those others having no choice but to borrow. I want a middle-class world, where nobody has to borrow, and everybody has to work — at least, as much as anybody has to work at all, since to get back on topic, ideally technology will spare us all from work eventually. But if many people are still in a position where they have to borrow when that happens, and can only afford to borrow by working, and working is suddenly unnecessary, then they're all completely fucked, and either most of the world will just die (which you seem to think would be fine), or more likely they'll go down kicking and screaming and take you and all of civilization down with them. I don't like either of those options, but instead of focusing on how to fight the whole point of technology and make continual work for everyone (well, for those poor plebs who don't have the choice to not work), I'd rather focus on eliminating the need for anyone to borrow, and then we can all welcome the end of work and the glorious robot utopia that comes with it.

Wonderful, then we have no disagreement because I haven't advocated that.

But not all investing is lending with interest. Just like all capitalism is free-market but not all free markets are capitalist. Basic set theory here.

"Capitalism is private ownership and operation of property."

"As to Marx, keep it to yourself"

All I hear here is "la la la I can't hear you". You're arguing against things I'm not saying and ignoring the things I am saying. I'm done here. Except:

The amount of savings people can accumulate being proportional to their labor is a GOOD THING. If you are making money just by having money, without working, you are accruing the product of someone else's labor. Money sitting in a pile by itself doesn't magically multiply itself; people working with the things it buys is what generates new wealth. Every bit of new wealth generated is generated by someone, and if you're getting wealth that you didn't generate, you're getting it at someone else's expense.

(And because you apparently can't read: the above is not saying the market is a zero-sum game. Do not try to interpret it to mean that. Pay attention to the word "generate". New value is being made all the time. It's just a question of who keeps the value that who makes).

In answer to most of your questions, the division as I'm framing it is thus:

- If you have the option to not work (even if you do work), you are upper class.
- If you don't have the option to not work, but you have the option to not borrow (even if you do in fact borrow), you are middle class.
- If you don't have the option to not work, or even the option to not borrow, you are lower class.

And to be clear, I'm not just talking about borrowing money, but any kind of capital, including land, so anyone who is stuck renting their home (doesn't have the option to not rent) is lower class.

At present that appears to be the only option, but it doesn't sound like a reasonable option to me, and the necessity of it is a symptom of what I see as the root problem of capitalism, rent. Rent distorts the cost of real capital (and also the cost of labor) in multiple ways: it makes the capital in higher demand by those who can afford it outright, not for its intrinsic use-value but for the rents they can command by possession of it, and that increased demand increases the price and thus relative to if only people intending to use it for themselves were buying; and on the other hand, it gives a falsely "inexpensive" alternative to buying which is actually infinitely expensive in the long run, luring people who would otherwise have to buy into a trap that prevents them from becoming able to buy. In the absence of rent, say if it were just suddenly abolished entirely (which I don't advocate —I have plans for a more gradual, less painful transition), you would suddenly have a bunch of homeless people and a bunch of unoccupied homes; the unoccupied homes would then be of no value to their owners except as a useless asset to be sold off; but nobody else would want to buy those "useless" homes as "investment properties" anymore, since they can't be rented out, so the only people who would be in the market to buy them would be the people who actually want to live there themselves; most of the people who actually want to live there either already bought something there in the old market (and so aren't in the market to buy anymore), or couldn't afford to buy and so had to rent, i.e. the masses of now-homeless people; the only way the owners of those homes can get any value out of them is thus to sell them to the now-homeless former renters, which means selling them at prices and on terms (e.g. in installment payments) that those former renters could afford. And voila, suddenly it is affordable to buy housing in such places.

Of course, it might not work out quite so perfectly just like that, because not everybody who had been renting before would be able to afford even the new lower prices and easier terms of buying. But that's where the distortions of the labor market come in. Those people who couldn't afford it would be the people with the lowest-paying jobs, your waiters and store clerks and such, and if those people categorically cannot afford to live in that location, suddenly there is nobody available to wait tables or work registers, and demand for them goes up drastically. The people already living there can't take those jobs because they don't pay enough to live there and if they took them they wouldn't be able to live there anymore, leaving all those low-paying jobs still unoccupied, and the demand for them skyrocketing — in turn raising the price that will be offered for jobs in such high demand, until it reaches the level that those jobs actually pay enough for people to afford to live there.

With rent in existence, expensive places have a situation similar to a manorial lord and his servants, except spread out amongst more parties; the "servants" (the waiters and store clerks and such) are still subservient to their landlords and employers, it's just that those are different people instead of one person being both, and most of the "income" paid to these lower-rung workers merely passes through them immediately on its way from one lord (the employer) to another (the landlord). If rent went away, those "lords" would either have to make due without servants (in which case what's the point of being rich if you have to bus your own table), or else each end will have to sacrifice some of their wealth to pay those "servants" enough (and charge them little enough) that they can actually afford to live there. And even if the rich do take the "make due without servants" option, now they're having to do the work that they could previously pay others to do, and so don't have as much option to not-work anymore, and have dropped down to a more middle-class position; meanwhile all the people who can't live in those places have since spread out elsewhere to places they can afford to live, taking their business and the consequent economic activity with them, to the boon of those other places and the loss of the places they'd left.

Basically, either the expensive crowded places get cheaper, pay more, or disperse to a more widespread distribution of more middling costs and pay, or some combination thereof, all of which have the result of there being more middle-class people and fewer upper- and lower-class ones.

Yeah, and this really bothers me. I will never willingly live somewhere with HOA fees as that defeats the entire purpose of owning. I've begrudgingly accepted the fact that property taxes are pretty much inescapable, but where I live those are still paltry compared to the cost of rent.

Do you rent? That is a debt — an infinite debt in fact, one that you will never be done paying off. That makes you working class, unless you have other investments counteracting that (e.g. stock dividends sufficient to pay your rent), and don't have to constantly labor just to pay someone for the privilege of existing somewhere.

If you own a house already, and borrow $100k to buy a more expensive house, but already have enough equity in it that you could always fall back to a less expensive house again if necessary, then I would say you're still middle class. Having debt doesn't knock you out of the middle class; having to have it does. If you don't have enough capital to have any option but to constantly borrow it from others, you're working class, not middle class.

Ok, you sound squarely middle-class by my definition. I don't see why you'd think you wouldn't.

You seem to be replying to everything I've written in this thread without reading any of it.

Nowhere have I advocated redistribution of wealth. I have highlighted problems that come from uneven distribution of it, and more importantly, problems that create and perpetuate that uneven distribution in the face of natural market forces that would normally spread it out, and I've noted that there are solutions to those problems other than forced wealth redistribution, and that criticism of the problems is not tantamount to advocacy of that one "solution". But you can't seem to wrap your head around that last point, and think that pointing out the problem has to be tantamount to advocacy of one solution, even as I keep saying over and over again that I am not advocating that solution, but trying to bring attention to alternatives to it.

No, it is not. Read a fucking history of economics. You plugging your ears and insisting "capitalism just means a propertarian free market" doesn't make it so.

The rest of what you wrote is completely non-sequitur to anything I've been saying. I have no objection to some people paying other people to do jobs, and complex businesses of people all working together to be more productive than any of them individually. That is not "capitalistic exploitation"; that is just free trade of services. It's not capitalism until you get to talking about unearned income: someone making money simply by virtue of having money (or other capital), without having to actually work for it. If you're making money by working, including paying other people to work for you, and directing and coordinating them, that's great, that's the wonderful free market at work, but that is not capitalistic, except to the possible extent that you might be able to pay your workers less than they would really be willing to accept for their labor if they weren't bend over a barrel by other factors elsewhere — like rents and other debts. Those are where capitalism begins, people accruing wealth simply from letting others borrow their wealth, with no work required. Marx and his criticism of the workplace as exploitative was looking at the wrong end of the equation; the only reason people are desperate for work and can be taken advantage of by their employers is because they are beholden to the real capitalists elsewhere, their landlords and creditors.

Buying it slowly over time. There are fairly simple arrangements of pure sales which look and feel very rent-like on the short term but become more and more like the straight-up purchases they really are in the long term, which allows for the legitimate functions that rent appears to serve to be served, while circumventing the large scale systematic problems that is causes. I can explain in more detail if you like, but the basic picture is (to use housing rent as the paradigmatic example) that you start paying monthly payments exactly like you were renting, but you gradually build equity that you can get back out of it when you move, or you eventually end up owning it if you don't move.

(How much you get back when moving depends on how long you stay there, how urgently you need to move, and what choices you've made with regards to the upkeep of the place; if you want to move frequently with no hassle and no questions and have someone else guarantee all the upkeep for you, that's probably going to cost you similarly to ordinary rental, but if you just want to live somewhere semi-permanently and treat it nice while you're there and find a replacement for yourself when you do eventually move, but simply can't afford to just buy a place, you won't be stuck renting indefinitely; over your life you will gradually build up equity until you eventually own something somewhere).

Not on money, no, but it is effectively illegal to be homeless — there is nowhere you are allowed to even exist without paying someone for the privilege — so people are forced to borrow land "at interest" (renting it), and in almost all cases, if they every want to escape from that perpetual debt and trade it in for a temporary one that will eventually be paid off, there are not other options available but to borrow money.

Now I know you're just trolling. "You can always just kill yourself. That is an option. Would save us all a lot of trouble if we proper folk didn't have to deal with you rabble."

I never said they did, and you seem stuck in the Marxist mindset that any criticism of capitalist exploitation entails a rejection of free markets and advocacy of forced wealth redistribution. There are other solutions besides state socialism, and just because you don't like that solution doesn't mean you can flatly deny the problem entirely.

As for most of the rest of your post, you're also confusing "investment" with "lending at interest". True investment is a purchase of equity: you buy into a business venture you think will be profitable and take a share of the risk and a share of the potential reward. That is the trivial solution to how capital can get allocated to productive ventures without having to involve interest at all. Nobody's going to buy a share of "Roman Mir Wants A Big-Screen TV, Inc.", but they might buy into "Roman Mir Widget Company" if they think you can turn a profit (for you and them both) with the money they pay you for shares in your company.

That is exactly the problem with rent. It's a cost that gives no asset in return, preventing people from building wealth even as they labor and earn more income than they need to pay for what they consume. How is someone who can barely make rent ever going to save up to buy any land anywhere? It's not like they can just start putting their rent money immediately toward interest-free payments that go entirely to building them equity in land. They need to save a big chunk for a down payment first, and then a big chunk of their monthly expenses is still going to interest. Rent and interest keep people from being able to get land of their own.

As for "imagination and drive" and "look for land where it's cheaper", it's completely unreasonable to expect, for example, the vast majority of the population of California, the most populous state of the union, most of whom cannot afford land there, to move halfway across the continent to places where their incomes would let them eventually escape rentespecially since, in those places, the likely would not be able to get even those meager incomes they already have, since all the jobs are in the populous and thus expensive places where people and businesses who need labor are at.