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Comment by cynicalkane | Hacker News Reader

Banks and investors make money by doing nothing

Marx thought the same thing, and decided that to remedy the situation the lower class should steal the capital from the upper class. Marx was wrong, and so are you.

Cynicism about capitalism is popular in this recession, but that speaks less about the failures of capitalism and more about the fickleness of public opinion. Allocation and management of capital is a bit harder than throwing money at things and expecting it to stick, as millions of American investors have discovered over the past two years. Anyway, it seems ironic to have this pseudo-communist whining on a board run by a venture capitalist.

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> Anyway, it seems ironic to have this pseudo-communist whining on a board run by a venture capitalist.

Huh? Why are you trying to call people 'communists' now? Please don't try to turn this into some sort of political mud-slinging contest.

The bottom-line in this discussion is that Zappos's culture and customer service was the thing that set it apart from other retailers. It was the reason that people wanted to shop there. To try and marginalize the effect this has on Zappos' bottom-line because it can't be easily quantified in terms of dollars and cents on a quarterly earnings reports by calling it a 'social experiment' or 'insignificant' is short-sighted at best.

> Allocation and management of capital is a bit harder than throwing money at things and expecting it to stick, as millions of American investors have discovered over the past two years.

That may be true, but investing money in a business does not make you an expert in that business's core competency.

It is ok to call a piece of text communist if it contains ideas or opinions that are typically communist. That capital markets in general are unnecessary, (very) ineffective at capital allocation (as opposed to the alternatives) and/or immoral is something almost only communists/hardcore socialists believe today. (It was actually once a widely held belief. A belief reflected in the nature of some new deal programs, Mussolini's economic policy or post-colonization economic policy in the third world to mention some examples.)

Correction: I called the GP post a 'pseudo-communist rant' I'm not saying jrockway is necessarily an actual communist, or even a pseudo- one... rather that he has, whether on purpose or not, stated a classically Communist belief about capitalist political economy.

That is, I wanted to point out that the claim being made--that capital owners, in capitalism, add nothing to the capital they own--is fundamental to a philosophy we now understand to be old, bad and dangerous.

It's astonishing that this got downmodded. Marxists did think that banks and investors did nothing (or, at least, that they did whatever they did badly and should be replaced with an elite of planners.) Pseudo-communist rhetoric (as in rhetoric without any real connection or commitment to communism per se) is indeed very popular in a recession.

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