You are mixing together business owners and rentiers (property owners). Very different things. Property owners don't need to work 60-hour weeks unless they are the sole handyman for 100+ houses.
The tradeoff is that if you use a property management company, most of the profit from your properties flows to them, because they don't work for free. There is also a non-negligible risk involved in moving your control of your assets over to a barely-interested third party.
Truly passive income is rare, and it always involves a dollar-and-cents tradeoff in how much profit and oversight you're willing to forfeit to others in exchange for open time.
Very few people are Scrooge McDucks with all the time in the world to swim around in a vault full of gold coins, and of those rare people who could, even fewer actually find that to be a worthwhile use of their time.
The key takeaway here is that everyone has got their problems and concerns, and in this competitive world, it is naive to assume that anyone can maintain their position without significant effort.
A lot of work goes into property ownership. It's just not very expensive.
Sure, but the $/hour return is much higher that the average job. 'A lot' isn't a good quantifier. I bet the same people who live in the house he rents work a lot more for a lot less money.
>Very few people are Scrooge McDucks with all the time in the world to swim around in a vault full of gold coins
True, but there are a lot more people who comfortably live off money their investments and properties make. This isn't about the 1%.
>The key takeaway here is that everyone has got their problems and concerns, and in this competitive world, it is naive to assume that anyone can maintain their position without significant effort.
Key takeaway from where? The author point still stands. The takeway from the article is that people don't get paid according to their hardwork, rather it is a lot of luck.
It is naive to assume anyone can maintain their position without significant effort, sure. But it is also naive to declare that without knowing for certain. I personally know people who work less than hour a week and make as much as the average software engineer in the US.
Sidenote:
This whole thread is sad to read. Most comments take a single part of the article then start to bash the author or question the validity of his thesis. Many on here didn't even bother to read the article properly, which I assume the topmost parent of this comment chain is also a part of.
Life isn't fair, and many people have trouble with coping with that fact. I just didn't think HN would have trouble with that too.
The author also advocates for the employee's "right to say no". On this point I agree, in that employees should be able to accumulate wealth and have options. There should not be a one-way street.
The many ideas that people had a couple centuries ago don't hold up so well anymore. The population of the world when the book you refer to was published (17 century) was 8% of what it is currently. Resource utilization was a fraction of what it is today.
Today natural resources are dwindling and powerful people are quicker than ever at capturing anything of value. There is an imbalance in what one can do with their best efforts today, and that's not fair.
Acknowledging the faults in our current society is a better path to take rather than advocating for the arguments put forward by someone who probably couldn't fathom today's world.
What? I'm sorry but that went straight over my head. You said
>... As an owner I wish this were true. For me and most owners I know work is mandatory, and its 60 hour weeks and a lot of sleepless nights. There is no safety net. There is no unemployment. I get no workman's compensation. I have no employment law protections. Its, as one HN comment said some time ago, "a suffering contest" a lot of the time.
Which looks very much like something a startup owner, or atleast a new business owner would say. I can assure you a property owner will sing a very different tune.
>And, that rent-seeking is very much taxed, contrary to the author's contention, at multiple levels and in many ways.
The author didn't deny that. He just said how he was re-investing the income therefore isn't going to get taxed on the rent. This again tells me that you didn't read the article properly.
Owning real estate means that your income is market rent - carrying cost - amortized capital expenses.
My coworker owns about a dozen 2-4 family properties and spends about 10 hours a week on them. Most tenants are section 8, which means he's paid on time by the government and gets above market rate for marginal property. He probably nets around $250k.