this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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Microblog Memes

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 hours ago

Imagine you have a sandwich to spare. You could really use a drink though. There's a hungry guy with a drink to spare, and he'd give it to you in exchange for the sandwich. That's trading.

Now imagine you run a sandwich shop. You need things like bread and toppings. If you just give your sandwiches away with nothing in return, you'll run out of ingredients. No more sandwiches :(

So you need someone to give you sandwich ingredients. They also don't just want to give their things away, because they also need other things.
Not everyone who has bread or toppings to share needs a sandwich though. A baker, for example might need flour. The miller might need grain. The farmer however does need a sandwich.
So to get your bread, you'd trade your sandwich to the farmer for some grain, that grain to the miller for flour, the flower to the baker and finally get your bread.

That's a bit tedious though, so instead you all agree on a token of some value representing the work you put in to make this. You give your sandwich to the farmer in exchange for such a token, then go to the baker and trade it for bread. The baker trades it for flour, the miller for grain. That token is money.

Now, how do you get that token? Someone needs to have it first, after all, and give it to the farmer so the farmer can buy a sandwich. They'll want something in return too, eventually - maybe they don't need anything right now, but they will somewhere down the line, and they need to have that token back for that. That's a loan.

Now, the farmer gave the token back, but the lender gave them a larger set of tokens. They used it to buy a better plow that helped them cultivate a larger area, netting them more grain they can trade for tokens. After giving the loaned tokens back, he'll still have some left over. That's profit.

Now one farmer starts gathering more tokens, because he got particularly lucky, and offers some to other people in exchange for a share of their land. Those other people had a bad year and desperately need some food, which the tokens can buy. In the long run, trading away their land will leave them off worse, but the short term is more important. That's exploiting the misery of others.

The lucky guy, on the other hand, can't work all that land himself, so he offers to let the less lucky ones work on his land in exchange for a portion of the tokens their work brings in. Again, they need that money to compensate the fact they now have less land, so they agree. That's labour.

Notice how the lucky guy gives them a portion of their labour's worth? He keeps the rest, for the privilege of owning that land he bought from them in the first place. That's landlording.

He uses some of his profit to pay others to enforce his claim to that land. He uses some to buy more land. He uses his control of the majority of grain supply to leverage the miller into selling his mill too (although a skilled miller is worth a lot, so the lucky guy keeps the poor miller on as a labourer too). That's concentration of wealth.

Eventually, he can use all that surplus to buy draft animals and more plows to make the farming even more effective. Obviously, his own lands benefit first, then he lets the poorer farmers pay to use these as well. By controlling the means of production, he forces the labourers into dependency at unfavourable terms. That's exploitation.

Now, all that extra money from surplus grain can fund more things that aren't food production. That enables the development of specialists in other areas, and due to it being non-perishable, the money can also be allowed to trade things across greater distances, because merchants can now use it to buy food and other things along the way instead of having to trade locally. Technologies, tools, material and luxuries all reach a broader customer base. That's an economy.

Of course, due to the majority of the money being controlled by a few lucky people, those people end up affording most of the luxuries while the rest has to work hard for a living. That's oligarchy.

Eventually, the steam engine is invented and heralds an age of industry. However, setting up factories to effectively harness the productive capability of those machines requires a lot of up-front investment for the machines, space, infrastructure and administration required to operate it efficiently. There just so happens to be a group of people with the wealth to fund all these things, and just as they controlled the land, the grain supply, the mills and so on, they now control the means of production.

Now imagine if the poor farmers were bailed out by a communal fund instead - a form of social safety net to catch them that they all pay into in good years, knowing a bad year won't ruin them. They could afford communal draft animals and plows, they could fund an administrative apparatus to enable all those advantages of a monetised society, a military to secure them against the jealousy of greedy neighbours, all without parasites growing fat off of their sweat. Pretty sure there's a name for that too.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 10 hours ago

My dad: “What, you think everyone should just be entitled to food for free even if they don’t have a job?”

Me: “Yes.”

My dad: “… oh”

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 hours ago

Ironic using Miyazaki, a known socialist for this meme.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

I love that when these people make such analogies and fail miserably, never do they take it as a moment for reflection.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 hours ago

I could see the dad going "Ok ok ok, forget food for a minute because that's complicated. Let's say instead it's freezing outside and you have a house but this person doesn't... Wait, no that's complicated too. Ok so let's say you're a doctor and a poor person is sick."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago

The view from the top of Mt Dunningkruger is spectacularly clear.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I think it has more to do with people's misunderstanding of what money even is or why it was created. Having money or an economy in general doesn't preclude generosity. Paper money evolved from a form of I-OWE-YOU notes. An I-owe-you note is only as valuable as the trust you put in the person writing the note. Now you can't vet every single person you find and it's difficult to transfer those notes from one person to another and hand written notes are easy to forge. So most people used metal currency as it has a mutual agreed value. Now metal currency is inconvenient for the fact it's heavy, so banks would write Promissory Notes with the bank's seal on it, which has the backing and trust of the banks that issues. Personally, I don't necessarily trust banks, but I trust them more then Joe Schmo. Eventually, the State got involved to regulate the banks and create their own "Promissory Notes" in the form of paper currency.

Money is very simply, regulated, tangible trust. I trust that what I will be compensated with for my goods/services can be used to acquire other goods/services from a different party. We all have the same trust in the same money.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

These kinds of lessons always go better if you don't choose something like food in the example.

It's a lot easier to teach someone that their labor has value, than to teach someone that other people deserve to starve if they don't have enough dollars.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 12 hours ago

Because letting people starve when there’s plenty of food is morally reprehensible, and even children understand that’s a horrible way to design a society.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 12 hours ago

But that would be teaching them evil socialism, not good capitalism.

Food? Water? Shelter? Acceptance? All commodities. Can’t afford them kiddo? Fuck off from our civilized society™

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

I like to use water and then oxygen. At first they really want the water. But then very quickly they really want the oxygen instead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago

you can see the dad thinking "oh god I'm raising a commie"

[–] [email protected] 86 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Do I need the sandwich too? If so I'll give him half (if he asks for it, otherwise I'll just sit there and eat the whole thing while missing social cues like a dumbass).

Will I need the sandwich in the near future? If so, then again, I'll give him half.

Did I just eat a meal and I don't need the sandwich now nor in the immidate future? By all means, eat!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

I particularly like how this would be the exact same if you were someone who wants money for the sandwich. Perfect illustration for how useless it is to bring money to the mix.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

The name of that son? Pjotr Kropotkin

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago

The Conquest of Sandwich

[–] [email protected] 15 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

I mean father is right: the kid has much to learn. People might be kind in nature, but learn when they get ripped off from other people who have already lost their trusting nature.

If only we could all reset to the kind, trusting human nature.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

If only we could all reset to the kind, trusting human nature.

No one is stopping you. There's plenty of it out there, you just have to be willing to see it (E: not to mention, it isn't human nature that's the problem that needs resetting, it's capitalism that needs abolishing).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 hours ago

If only we could all reset to the kind, trusting human nature.

That thought has been with me for a while. Spoilers for Joe Haldeman's Forever Peace, but he's explored the concept in a fiction setting where humans can directly connect their brains to each other with a plug in the back of the skull, to directly feel each other's feelings and body. They use it for sex and war machines, which is ridiculous at first, but then it makes sense.

But the protagonists discover that if you connect to another you become "humanized", and unable to do any harm whatsoever to any other human, seeing it as a damage upon one's self.

Pretty good book, would recommend.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 14 hours ago

Tit for tat plus 10% forgiveness

[–] bdonvr 5 points 13 hours ago

Sounds like projection, dad. Greedy fuck.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Sandwich: A Factor in Evolution

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Hoagie Hamilus

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

It's not the easiest way to start thinking about money, but I've come to like thinking about it as a form of potential energy.

At the end of the day it is used to inspire work from another, even if it ends up in a billionaires hand that does no work, they use it in turn to inspire the work of others. Even as payment after the fact, the promise of the payment is the inspiration to do some form of work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Sounds like trickle-down economics to me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

It wasn't meant to appear that way. I wasn't trying to speak of the supposed billionaire in a good fashion, just that at the end of the day money is only used to get someone to do something which even the billionaire needs to do as they don't labor, others do on their behalf. In the case of the billionaire it's actually a huge issue in this respect as they have a massive amount of potential energy to inspire a ton of work that could be, and is, used against us.

Even if the person has already done the work, they did it for the promise of money they can then use to have someone else do something (or have already done something and are trading the fruits of their labor for the "energy deficit.")

The promise of money is the inspiration to expend energy.