theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth-banks-google-facebook-society-economy-parasites This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have “made it”. By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world.
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.
So entrenched is this assumption that it’s even embedded in our language. When economists talk about “productivity”, what they really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like “welfare state”, “redistribution” and “solidarity”, we’re implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.
In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we hail as “successful” and “innovative” are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts are not down around the bottom, but at the very top.
Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about it. Even for politicians on the left, it’s a non-issue.
To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our “human capital” in economic terms) to create something new, whether that’s a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.
But there is also a second way to make money. That’s the rentier way: by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others’ expense, using his power to claim economic benefit.
For those who know their history, the term “rentier” conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century’s large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty. These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier’s right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you’ll see rentiers everywhere.
There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard. Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass “rent” on their wealth.
Matthew Morgan
Even the big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It’s hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled to their wealth.
It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I’ll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole.
Don’t get me wrong. Banks can help to gauge risks and get money where it is needed, both of which are vital to a well-functioning economy. But consider this: economists tell us that the optimum level of total private-sector debt is 100% of GDP. Based on this equation, if the financial sector only grows, it won’t equal more wealth, but less. So here’s the bad news. In the United Kingdom, private-sector debt is now at 157.5%. In the United States, the figure is 188.8%.
In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It’s not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it’s going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximising the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion. Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim, earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell, who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.
We get paid in relation to how easy we are to replace m8? So in China you get paid fuck all because they can replace your feckless hide in seconds with one of 10,000 equally shiftless folks within a stone's throw. Globalism has tried it's best to devalue Western wages by first outsourcing jobs to where there are 10000:1 levels of replaceability, then reverse-outsourcing workers by the boatload.
So, no, this chap is clueless. Wages in the UK service sector rose £2/hour in the past two years thanks to foreigners fucking off due to the Brexit chaos, making the indigenous population less replaceable. The service sector being the one which requires the least education and/or keyskills to function within.
You want to help the poor without mass murder or neonazism? Make retirement mandatory and set the age to 60. Thank you kindly for you hard work, now fuck off out of the way and enjoy your retirement.
We on the Right MUST protect the capitalist class from the Leftists and socialists so that they can continue to demonise us in their media and fire/ban us when our political opinions are expressed on their platforms.
If we don't protect the capitalists, WHO WILL????
John Sanchez
But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.
Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer regularly unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture medications that resemble what we’ve already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers, and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.
Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.
Even more important, many of these companies function as “natural monopolies”, operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.
Aptly characterising this “platform capitalism” in an article, Tom Goodwin writes: “Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”
So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because they’re cool and they’re fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we’re all happy to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook … because their friends are on Facebook. Most of Mark Zuckerberg’s income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn’t come cheap. Don’t be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it’s an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US.
you are right social dumping and the increased competition for certain manual labour jobs are real menaces to our society but if you want to see who's guilty, you just have to look who profits from the situation imho.
Noah Hughes
But don’t Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we’ll all click on more and more ads. Uber has usurped the whole taxi sector just as Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.
Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody who passed by pay. Today’s tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people’s free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their earnings.
This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts. So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?
I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it. But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a credit default swap, or a collateralised debt obligation? Or the revenue model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don’t the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too? Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?
Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs’ CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. “The world’s most powerful investment bank,” wrote the journalist Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs, “is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”
But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker. He goes to great lengths to present himself as a “job creator” and an “investor” who “earns” his income by virtue of his high “productivity”. Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.
However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is “doing God’s work”. The Sun King would have approved.
The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We’re all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.
Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it’s in their interest if house prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades we’ve all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.
The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts. En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.
It's much easier to pick up garbage for a living than to start a successful business. That's why company owners make more money. They have higher value in society. It's the way of nature. That's all that capitalism is. You say success is reward but the reality is that it is earned.
Levi Richardson
how hard is it exactly to threaten a government to bail you out to avoid "total economic collapse"?
Bentley Baker
Not if you're a jew who has other jews lend you a billion dollars
Brayden Brown
Government bailouts has nothing to do with capitalism. If somebody took your money and gave it to somebody else you should be angry at the thief not the beggar. Your problem is with the government.
Jose Evans
Your problem seems to be more with Jews than with anything else
Justin Cooper
its not really a beggar and more of a hostage taker. My problem is with both. one for taking the economy hostage, and the other encouraging him by paying the ransom money and not calling the cops.
Don’t get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it’s hard to point fingers at a kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.
So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.
Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It’s no different for the modern rentier. He’s got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That’s why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.
The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society’s best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it’s insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.
One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child’s growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality.
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy.
Henry Garcia
moar pls
Wyatt Bailey
The only way you can take the economy "hostage" is through laws, hence the government.
Eli Jackson
Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society’s biggest freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through a system of, say, employee shares, or a universal basic income.
But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the old-fashioned faith in “solidarity” with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders of society’s strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.
And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all. or the removal of laws which were done by politicians bribed by lobbyists (like removing the split inbetween investment banks and saving banks)
If you want to split hairs, you take the economy hostage through the minds of the people. Laws and government only last as long as the people permit it to. Who's whispering in your ear every day trying to sway your opinion to their favor?
Alexander Ross
I do what I can. It's not much, but it's a lot more than demoralizing others for the sake of my roll over and die instinct.
Chase Sullivan
>holy fuck straight to page ten heh? What do you want? We know the Jews are herding the Goyim. How fucking new are you?
Juan Parker
Amai hard read Well done op Gas the (((rentiers)))
Mason Wilson
I spoke too soon I guess, i was just frustrated to see it slip down to page nine with no replies..
Your walls of text are basically 'da juws' We know. Also this board has been filled with bots for the last 18 months that slide everything. It's only worse now with the 2020 bullshit starting.
Connor Moore
>Your walls of text are basically 'da juws' Where was that part? I missed it.
Robert Jones
Fortunately, they don't understand the Streisand effect. Their very opposition only emboldens our convictions. When they try to shill their talking points it just makes everyone want the exact opposite.
Carter Thomas
this movement didnt really took off in Flanders, and organises by facebook, which i don't use. Ive been buying from local producers and be very frugal, not wasting money into status symbols or engage into debt.
Funniest part is (((Dutch))) historian. EMJ breaks it down well in the Goys Guide to World History. The Jews fled to the Netherlands after the inquisition and began mercantilism, the slave trade and so forth. Dutch are ultra-kiked and always have been.
Joshua Bennett
Have some cocaine
Owen Allen
abolish intellectual property law these laws stifle advancement, and create state enforced monopolies on ideas, methods, procedures, shapes, colors, sounds, etc.
>but but muh innovation fuck off kike ideas aren't scarce. anyone can come up with them, and most of them are obvious
abolishing intellectual property willl eviscerate (((rentiers))) who disproportionately control media, news, culture, academia, medicine, and many other areas.
Thomas Stewart
Fuck off the jews were parasites on our success as they are in the JewSA and everywhere else they stuck their big noses.
Robert Allen
Bless you OP, if you have anything else to say on this matter, go on, I'm saving it all
whether you are a zoomer leftie or a boomer conservative, or a "enlightened centrist" everyone instinctively feels something is amiss, and they know we know, so the news cycles will keep pumping out distractions to divide and agitate all of us and keep us buzy embroiled against each other and it breaks down the feeling of unity in places (americans polled recently on the question "would you let a member of another political party marry your offspring" answered from 4% no in the past to 33% no nowadays), thx to the internet and places like Jow Forums we can stand as a block globally against the ((rentiers))) by informing yourself and participate in discussion without identity politics.
Guy spends alot of time with a well written critique of economics and you call him an antisemite. One day maybe Jews like you will realize it's mostly you who name yourself.
>Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why But it wasn't REAL capitalism Let's try it again, now in your country :)
Why are we not using their tactics
Bentley Campbell
Most of the economic problems people associate with the democrats comes from the fact that they give everything to the state, who is great (in principal) at showing solidarity with all members of society, but is impersonal, impossible for an ordinary to change or influence (ie. too big to fail), and regularly ignores the advice of those most directly in contact with the situation.
The market on the other hand directly gives power to those who are in contact with the situation, and at the very least small businesses can be relatively easily changed and influenced by ordinary people. The problem is the market is terrible at showing solidarity with non-contributing members of society, and is more notorious than the state for doing (((things))) for itself at expense of the common good when it can get away with it.
The state is incompetent, and regularly less effective when compared to smaller institutions, and the market fails to help some of our family whom we have a duty to protect. It's clear to see we need both, the general formula being solidarity + subsidiarity. Whatever can be handled by a smaller unit, should be handled by the smaller unit, and we have a duty to help all our brothers. Combining these two, you would naturally come to the conclusion that you have a greater responsibility to your nation over others.
(from our most holy Catholic church) Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
As in do not worship democracy, nor the state, nor the market, it is idolatrous. These are merely tools to serve men.
