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This is the House that Marx built

Well, certainly the idea of money having an expiration date is something I am going to ponder a bit.

Where I disagree with him is that his points are abstract enough to sound good but do not necessarily comport with reality. His premise for his entire analysis seems to be that we have an unsustainable system of endless compounding. I take exception to that for a few reasons. First, at least in the US, endless growth is checked by redistributive taxation, inheritance taxes, and continuing devaluation by expansion of the monetary supply. More importantly, he discounts that people deploy that capital. There is always risk and the rich lose money. Today's billionaires for the most part are not children of last generation's billionaires or super wealthy. That capital is circulating quite nicely in that regard or else this would not be the case. The accumulation of capital by corporations in a backhanded way actually moves toward the common property goal because of the stock markets. If these were privately owned or closely held corporations, there might be a better argument, but for now, it is a little "The Sky is falling" to me.
 
gunner said:
I appreciate it's quite a long lecture, but I hope you find it interesting.
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How difficult is it for you to post a summary of what you think that post is all about?

You can't summarize it for us? Then, not worth watching in the first place.
 
Watching it now thanks for the share.
 
There's a lot about Marx I don't agree with, but I think our current system needs some tweaking. First of all, money is not real, and it is no longer proportional to the amount of work you put in. If getting rich were as simple as hard work, then the people of subsaharan Africa would have more money than anyone else in the world.

It's time to tie our material economy to real assets, like the environment. There's no point in having imaginary capital currency when we're destroying the planet and our source of life. If we can tie resources to production, we would have a more equitable system that could provide for everyone.

The class struggle is something that humans are going to play out for a long time no matter what kind of system we have, but we can at least tweak the current model so that the fiduciary responsibility of business is more in line with the general benefit of humankind, instead of mindless destruction and left-brained problem solving institutionalism.
 
Paralogic said:
How difficult is it for you to post a summary of what you think that post is all about?

You can't summarize it for us? Then, not worth watching in the first place.
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Your point is well taken but the linked page sort of does summarize the video well enough I suppose to at least give you the basic idea.
 
Paralogic said:
How difficult is it for you to post a summary of what you think that post is all about?
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That's not quite true. Now if you posted "my very brief, very nearly non-existent introduction" could of had more depth; and given a far better overview, I may well have agreed. But, because I did in-fact write a very brief intro "it is quite a long lecture" you make a false assumption, non sequitur.

You can't summarize it for us?
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Of course I can summarize, for you. Professor Harvey suggests we (capitalist society) have turned housing from a need, or as he succinctly puts it "the contradiction between use value and exchange value". He suggests what was once an item valued for its function has now become our main asset for 'exchange'. He does not seem to suggest this is bad practice per se, rather, the near on exponential rise in house prices is unsustainable. He links this in very well with Marx.


Then, not worth watching in the first place.
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That is of course your prerogative.

Paul
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gunner said:
What did you think?

Paul
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I thought it was great. Easy to understand, really made you think, got really background on the term "contradiction" loved it. Thanks for the share.
 
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