US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1533

On June 07 2019 01:39 xDaunt wrote:

The profit is part of the compensation. It's a basic component of price-setting.

On June 07 2019 01:42 GreenHorizons wrote:

It's the difference between the value of the work done and the price paid, no?

On June 07 2019 01:44 xDaunt wrote:

Look, just get to the point. I have little patience for stupid questions.

On June 07 2019 01:46 GreenHorizons wrote:


I'm trying to understand why you believe "the owner" should realize the "profit" and not the people who did the work?

On June 07 2019 02:13 xDaunt wrote:

The simple answer is that the renting of property has nothing to do with work. They are discrete concepts that you are conflating for some reason. The question that you seem to want to ask is the justification for someone profiting off of another person’s labor. But I’ll let you ask it if that’s your intent.

I can think of lots of distinctions. And I can also think of ways in which they are similar.

On June 06 2019 19:46 Nebuchad wrote:


Oh yeah, you're not the only one making the mistake, some important figures in the american left do it as well. Cenk Uygur has this argument where he goes "You already like socialism, you like the military and the fire department" and that's excessively cringe.

It doesn't change that the way you treat capitalism and socialism is inconsistent, as I showed earlier.

Edit: I hadn't read your example and just assumed that you had found one that went well with your argument, cause there are a ton of them. What you chose is... quite poor actually. This is definitely more of a socialist point than a big government point from AOC.

On June 06 2019 10:00 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's better. Particularly when those profits are stolen social benefits in the first place, as is the case in examples like Walmart.

EDIT: Also None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use

As Paul Hawken likes to put it, we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it GDP.

On June 07 2019 02:23 GreenHorizons wrote:


This is why I asked for clarification on whether you saw them as distinct and you told me
You could have been more clear if you wanted?

What I'm trying to get from you is your reasoning for an owner profiting from their ownership specifically.

On June 07 2019 02:57 CatharsisUT wrote:


That's not what the underlying study actually says. That's only true if you first organize the top 20 by natural capital cost and THEN assess profitability. There are almost certainly tons of other, larger industries that are still profitable including natural capital cost.

On June 07 2019 03:06 xDaunt wrote:

You're asking me rather obtuse questions. I could answer them in any number of ways and I am disinclined to provide written treatises that cover all possibilities. If you have a discrete question to ask, then ask it.

In this latest post, you're asking about the concept of ownership specifically and the right of the owner to profit from his property. This right to profit from property is nothing more than a consequence of property rights in general. If you own something, then you have complete control and dominion over it. You can do nothing with the property. You can use it for yourself. You can charge people to use it for themselves. In practice, the use of property entails risks and costs. The owner of property is not going to let people use his property in exchange for an amount less than the sum total of all risks and costs associated with the use of the property. And even then, the owner still has little or no incentive to let someone else use the property if he gets nothing out of it himself. Accordingly, the owner reasonably expects a profit -- above and beyond the pure usage and acquisition costs -- to make it worth his while to allow others to use his property. This is all Econ 101 stuff.

This right to profit from property is nothing more than a consequence of property rights in general. If you own something, then you have complete control and dominion over it.

On June 07 2019 03:35 IgnE wrote:
The assumptions used to derive an arbitrary “natural capital cost” seem entirely unnatural and unlikely to convince anybody who doesn’t already believe the conclusion.

On June 07 2019 03:11 GreenHorizons wrote:


I'm open to seeing them. I'm not sure it has any significant impact on the point (or much on the headline for that matter if we see it in the context of the post).

Then whether they have an externality other than "natural capital cost" that reinforces the point that profitability seems to be primarily driven by externalities pushed onto the marginalized and exploitation of workers.

On June 07 2019 03:49 CatharsisUT wrote:


Maybe I'm not making this point clearly, because if I were you wouldn't claim it has no significant impact on the point (and the headline is just plan wrong). As far as I can tell, the study methodology was this:

1. Create a measure of negative externalities and call them "natural capital cost."

2. Calculate the total negative externalities by region/economic sector combination.

3. THEN sort the entire region/sector list by highest "natural capital cost."

4. Show only the top of this list and note that the top 20 become unprofitable.


So sure, it's not surprising that the most environmentally harmful industries are, in fact, environmentally harmful. But "none of the top 20 most environmentally harmful industries are profitable when including externalities" is a hugely different conclusion than "None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use." This is particularly relevant if used as part of an overall indictment of the global economic system rather than a critique of dirty industries and how we regulate externalities.

There are almost certainly tons of other, larger industries that are still profitable including natural capital cost.

On June 07 2019 03:35 IgnE wrote:
The assumptions used to derive an arbitrary “natural capital cost” seem entirely unnatural and unlikely to convince anybody who doesn’t already believe the conclusion.

On June 07 2019 03:11 GreenHorizons wrote:


They aren't obtuse, they are clarifying so that your position is clear before I counter it with my own framing/perspective since it seems to be in conflict with my own. This is the alternative to making presumptions based on somewhat vague phrasing and your own set of presumptions ("Econ 101 stuff"). + Show Spoiler +

Juxtaposed, we can compare and contrast, recognize the most true parts of the two, and provided this is dialogue, arrive at a more accurate description and view.

I've mentioned mine, it's mostly based on Marx (so presumptions of such, provided they are accurate, are reasonable for future reference), but you're free to ask for clarification at any point.

So you know, I don't accept a lot of your presumptions so you may tire of this quickly.
With that taken care of let's take a look at what we're working with:



I think this opener is already suspect. I think it's worth stopping here and focusing for a moment.

Property rights (is a term that describes) a social construct that designates who decides how a resource or economic good is used and owned. Part of that social construct is that the owner doesn't have absolute control over that property. Zoning and such is a manifestation of that bargain. Before you mentioned a renter is a "third party" I think you're right, but you seemed hesitant to acknowledge that the first two parties are the owner and the enforcing authority (as they legally aren't the same entity).

Was your hesitation indicative of a belief that the enforcement agency should be a private extension of the owner, a public entity like a local/central government, or something else responsible for enforcing everyone's individual ownership rights and settling disputes over common resources?

EDIT: To be reasonable I'll bookmark this as your position on these topics so you won't have to articulate these views again unless they change at a later point.

On June 07 2019 06:12 KwarK wrote:

This is a critique of the methodology without offering a better methodology nor disputing the conclusion. If you accept that the inclusion of external expenses onto the books could make the industry unprofitable then you're accepting the core premise at which point it's simply a matter of estimates.

On June 07 2019 06:41 xDaunt wrote:


Yes, they very much are obtuse questions. The problem is that you aren't asking me for my position like you think you are. You are asking me largely definitional questions about fairly rudimentary economic concepts that no one disagrees about. And to make matters worse, you are conflating various discrete concepts in the questions that you are asking. For example, you were previously conflating the concepts of profiting from work and profiting from rent. Your latest response is more of the same. Now you have moved the conversation from why an owner has a right to profit from his property to the topic of governmental regulation and enforcement of property rights (which is really neither here nor there when it comes to what was being discussed) and are making some rather bizarre assumptions about my prior posts.

To be quite candid, I think the problem here is that you don't have a particularly good grasp of any of this subject matter. Your citation to Marx gives the game away on this point. Marx didn't disagree with anything that I have said regarding how property rights function or how the owners of property (capital, if you will) act. Instead, what Marx did was look at this system that I have been describing, argue that it is broken, and then lay out a paradigm for how it should (and will) collapse and reform itself. This seems to be what you really want to talk about, which is why I previously asked you whether you wanted to discuss the justification for someone profiting off of another person's labor.

On June 07 2019 07:29 KwarK wrote:
GH, you're surely aware that ownership and investment often comes with the acceptance of risk of loss. The theoretical compensation is proportionate to the risk of loss.

Part of the surplus that a renter pays to the landlord is effectively an insurance premium that protects the renter from loss in the event of destruction of the property, market value fluctuations, and so forth. Another portion is purchasing an option that allows the renter to walk away from the property at any time, for example if they accept a job in another city, without any loss of capital. They are effectively insured against the illiquid nature of the asset they inhabit. The opportunity cost on alternate investments is another.

Renting is not simply burning money due to an inability to get on the property ladder. For many people it is a profitable proposition, renting better suits their capital position, desired asset allocation goals, and short term plans.

The issue is when market failures allow renters that provide no additional value to their tenants to exploit their position. But in the frictionless vacuum that the invisible hand operates in renting is not intrinsically exploitative.