OwenEverbinde

I feel like wearing FL-41 amber tinted glasses in the evening has helped my sleep. Orange tinted ones like Blublockers would do the same.

Oh! That is a good point. I shouldn't say the problem is money, (especially since I call this mini-monologue I'm trying to develop "The Problem is Growth")

My goal with that whole comment was to describe money's tendency to grow without limit. And I was under the impression, even as I posted, that I need a lot more practice before I can deliver a simple paragraph that can capture and convey the dangers I see in growth.

To answer your question, no. Money is not material value. Money is an abstract representation of value. Not a "store" of it (as I called it). It's separated from the material and labor value it represents. And in fact, it's probably that separation that makes it capable of the dangerous, cancerous growth that I am so wary of.

I would actually argue that money -- and not human nature -- is the point of failure. To be more specific, money's capacity for growth.

The second you have the growth associated with a store of value (the ability to spend $100 and get back $110), you have the capacity for different piles of value to grow at different rates (depending on things like luck, ruthlessness, and cleverness) without being limited by a single human's ability to labor.

And when you have different piles of money growing at different rates with no upper limit, you have some growing so fast that they become cancerous, sucking the resources out of the entire system.

It's both better and worse having this problem than having one of human nature. Worse because growth is an even more universal part of nature than greed. (So we can't get rid of it.) Better because it's something we are intimately familiar with trying to contain. We have surgeries for rapid cellular growths. We have antibiotics for rapid bacterial growths. We have entire forestry organizations that release hunting licenses dedicated to containing rapid deer population growth.

Growth is an incredibly simple, two-dimensional graph, and it's easy to tell when we're controlling a growth vs succumbing to it.

The meme said, "the means of production." It did not say, "every, single means of production."

The OP could have meant anything from workers electing their CEOs in 51% of the steel mills, smelteries, oil rigs, cinemas, restaurants, etc. all the way up to 100% like you decided to assume.

But honestly, it makes very little sense to read 100% into this, especially with your wording of "good or service-providing entity".

A hell of a lot of "good or service-providing entities" are sole proprietorships, which are in a blurry gray area between private ownership and cooperative ownership. On the one hand, many capitalists started out as sole proprietors. On the other hand, by owning one's own means of production, a sole proprietor is both worker and owner, fitting perfectly in the definition of socialism. In fact, I would argue that the sole proprietor doesn't really become a socialist or a capitalist until another worker joins the business and it becomes a cooperative or a private company. Until then, the distinction is meaningless.

The man's cult extends far beyond America's borders. Just like the "anti-woke" culture war.

She has #47 now. Who needs a pope?

Are their last words going to be "see? You were overreacting." right before someone pushes a button on their gas chamber?

Or have they already booked their tickets to some recently-confiscated house in the West Bank?

It has a delicious sort of passive aggressive vibe to it.

Did the alleged "slum lords" lose against the actual slum lords' smear campaign?

I wouldn't be surprised if they called developers "terrorists" at some point.

NIMBY property owners are so convinced of the righteousness of their assets -- and of the evil lurking within any effort to slightly slow down their appreciating value -- that I don't think there's a level of wickedness that exceeds a threat to those assets.

Like, I wouldn't be surprised if they thought: "these developers are worse than Bin Laden. At least Bin Laden didn't decrease the worth of MY property."

When the argument against an initiative says, "greedy developers" that is just a populist NIMBY smear spoken by even greedier, already-existing landlords.

I actually voted against a housing development one time because I got played by those words. I'm a little wiser now.