Eh, even the ‘taking’ in this example isn’t so simple.

By spending that $1, you’ve also given a farmer (plus middle men, plus a retailer) $1 they otherwise wouldn’t have had - and relieved them of an apple they already have too many of.

The big ‘taking’ events are when things are destroyed without an exchange of value (aka if those farmers can’t sell the apples because a new law passes, or there is a disease event, or the like), or where a market is cornered/controlled/manipulated to the extent someone is forced to sell for an artificially induced (lower) price, or sell at an artificially induced (higher) price.

Smaller ‘taking’ events are when something is actually consumed, but that has to happen eventually, and someone paid for it to happen. Which means they also traded something else for that money (time, work, whatever).

Otherwise, it’s numbers moving from one side of the book to the other. Things aren’t lost/destroyed, but are moving around.

▲

Epa095 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Money is not like mana in a game, it does not create things by itself. It is more similar to votes, each dollar is a vote into the economy for what should be created, and where the goods and services should go. And the more money you have the more votes you have.

So yes, he payes for the apple, and that's good. But the apple existed, and would be sold to someone else if he had not bought it. The accumulation of wealth does centralise power over the economy, what gets produced, and how it gets consumed.

▲

lesuorac 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, there's an economist comment on "We can afford everything that we produced".

Like when the Apple is produced it's not because a dollar bill was sowen into the ground. The actual inputs of production are not money but money is the lubricant that allows the goods and services to flow around in the economy. We always run into the situation where goods and services are produced and not demanded and that causes them to no longer be produced but the lack of money didn't cause their existence no more than money produced them in the first place.

Without it, societies had to have informal debts where you knew you helped your neighbor harvest crops so they would later do something for you (or perhaps you helped them harvest their crops because they provided shelter). That whole barter shit is made up.

▲

lazide 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Eh, that is overly reductive.

There would not be so many orchards or apple farmers growing apples if they could not exchange those apples for goods and services they wanted effectively.

At the level of a large scale apple orchard, money is the only thing that works effectively for that.

If people only grew enough apples that they wanted to eat, most people would be unable to get apples, and most apple lovers would be spending a lot of time they could be doing something else trying to grow apples. Overall edible apples would be dramatically lower, even non-existent at some places/times.

For example, imagine the shitshow if people had to refine their own gas, or barter/trade for it directly. Zero chance 99% of society would be able to do that.

Same with miners and raw materials, machine manufacturers and machines, solar panel manufacturers and solar panels, etc. etc.

Money itself isn’t a good/service, but it makes the act of making/exchanging/selling/etc. easy and possible at scale. Which is valuable on its own. And since it provides a generic ‘value’ proxy for all goods/services within the economy, if anything it is the most consistently valuable thing in a functioning economy - it’s a wildcard for value.

This does have a limit of course - too much money in too short/concentrated an area causes all sorts of crazy things to happen, as the induced effort/incentive to produce something outstrips the realistic ability to do so, causing escalating ‘money fights’ for the same goods, as the value of the goods starts to dwarf the perceived value of the money itself. (Inflation)

Just like too little money in too concentrated an area/time causes crazy things to happen because the perceived value of the money itself starts to outweigh the actual value of the transacted goods, and transactions can start to grind to a halt in an effort to conserve the increasingly valuable money itself. (Deflation)

▲

Epa095 9 hours ago | parent [-]

All you say is true. I never argued for the irrelevance of money. The voting power into the economy is extremely important, and it plays a vital role in the orchestration of the real economy (the part actually producing stuff and services).

But it is not such that billionaires provide some value with their consumption (they can provide value in other ways though). Yes, for the individual Yatch-producer (or farmer) is it nice that they get to sell their product, but for the economy at large all it does is move production-resourced from other things which could otherwise be produced to the production of yatches(or whatever the billionaire wants).

So yes, the billionaire does not take from the farmer. But he does take from the economy at large (in the same way as my consumption does, but to an extremely different degree).

	▲	lazide 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Billionaires don’t generally become billionaires by spending a lot of money on watches or apples or the like. They become billionaires (generally) by owning things and making those things more valuable in other people’s eyes. The vast majority of Elon Musks wealth, for instance, is in stock of Tesla, SpaceX, X, etc. It’s an entirely different kind of situation, because the wealth is generally due to other people’s estimates of the productive output/wealth generation of those assets increasing over time. In the musk example, it would be like if someone bought and then came in and funded the expansion of a big apple orchard that previously no one had ever heard of, and then made it internationally famous so that everyone wanted to be a part of it - and sold shares in that orchard to people. Now people are eating more of that orchards apples, everyone values that orchard more, and now what previously he owned but was cheap is now worth a lot. That is legitimate value creation, as much as you might hate him or the process. If he did it by burning down other orchards, he would be a criminal. But like in the spacex case (or Tesla case), it’s pretty hard to argue that is what happened. Maybe some light fraud here and there, at most. It mostly came from a lot of salesmanship and light/moderate gaslighting, but they are legitimately valuable companies - albeit maybe shouldn’t rationally be at the P/Es they are. But he is making the irrational happen. And that is making a lot of people money that otherwise wouldn’t, and making something happen that otherwise wouldn’t. Those people are very happy he is doing what he is doing. For the alternative, see the USSR. I’ve known people who lived in that system, and it was terrible.