It's like the old aristocracy days except for instead of the elite owning physical property and renting it out to the peasants, the elite own intellectual property and rent it out to the peasants.
[1] http://www.davidbrin.com/nonfiction/dogmaofotherness.html
the billionaires are lowering the interest bill as they compete to purchase treasuries. (the money is borrowed from whoever will accept the lowest interest for it. see https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/auctfund/work/work.htm under "Bidding".)
The only country in the world that just prints money when they need it is USA. No other country can do it — it'll just cause hyperinflation. China is not an exception. They can't print US dollars. And if they would print more Yuan, it doesn't mean that China billionaires would be able to buy more houses in LA - the exchange rate of Yuan to dollar will simply drop and they will be able to buy exactly the same amount of goods in US as before.
USA can print almost unlimited amount of money because they control almost all the world and bend most of the governments to buy US treasuries. This is why there're US military bases in many countries and if some country decide to stop accepting US dollar for foreign trade, the next day it's invaded by US military.
Although many people predict that this uncontrollable printing of US dollar will cause US economy to collapse sooner or later. You simply can't do that forever.
GDP per capita and even GDP per capita adjusted for PPP is also misleading because it uses the wrong basket of goods: focusing on things that dont matter.
People forget, wealth is not money. Wealth is the things you buy with money. Wealth is when you can afford the essentials of life: Shelter, food, water, medical insurance, education and transportation (with the costliest ones being Shelter and medical insurance). Consider the number of working hours the average person needs to expend to afford shelter and compare that to 500 years ago. I think you'll find that there hasn't been much improvement. In fact, in CA and bay area, I think you'll see that we're working even longer hours to afford basic shelter than 100s of years ago.
Of course we're wealthier. The shelter you get to enjoy today is leagues better than the shelter you got to "enjoy" hundreds of years ago. The net worth of humanity has gone up. Significantly. We have more advanced technology than ever before. Whatever GDP is measuring probably doesn't consider the fact that we have compounded knowledge and given ourselves things our 100 year old ancestors could not even imagine.
I'm so glad I'm alive at a time further into the future. I may not know how glad I am, because I may not be able to fully comprehend the loss of all of the things that I have today that were simply non-existent back then.
Those that argue we're no better off than we were 200 years ago are pretty unpersuasive these days.
I'm more worried about the next 200 years though. It took several thousand years of civilization to create the industrial revolution, and that was quickly followed by the information revolution. Both dramatically improved quality of life.
But what if this is the end of the exponential? What if Moore's law is dead, and breakthrough technologies like quantum computers or new propulsion systems aren't just "5 to 10 years away", but decades or centuries away?
There is a lot of evidence today suggesting that the industrial and communication revolution was a blip, closer to a step function in human development, preceded by slow linear growth and possibly followed by slow linear growth.
I'm not certain that this will indeed happen, but if it does, our entire society and world is in for a complete shock.
The most famous rant on this is Marx & Engel's manifesto. Chapter one explains how history works, making similar comparisons from their day to older days. The second chapter describes communism's aims. It's also (largely) a rant about the bourgeois.
Anyway, like most Marx, it's hard to translate to concrete terms. One unambiguous line stands out though. "..the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." - Communist Manifesto
In the very next paragraph, ambiguity re-enters. Even in theory, it's very hard to flesh this out. ...It's especially hard in the context he's most interested in: urban industry/society. Replacing all property with a "commons" is easier to imagine in a rural/village context. Rural commons exist.
I think Marx got the idea from a rural context. Formal and informal privatisations of agricultural commons were part of his stated inspiration, iirc.
Anyway, I think the basics are trivial. Property is effectively income generating by definition. If aristocracy is immoral, then property owning is immoral.
To me, this is a reductio ad absurdum for fundamentalist thinking... kind of like the monty python witch trial.
Now I get it.
And yes, the commons may well be becoming more of the world than the private world. interesting idea
Virtually every company is moving toward this model - Microsoft, Adobe, Disney, etc. That's my main complaint.
Liberal economists use this term the most, they usually mean large companies trying to get goodies from the state. Lefty ones tend to mean something like "profiteering."
X-as-a-service businesses models aren't exactly new in intellectual property. The patent/copyright systems explicitly assume licensing and royalties. But, I agree that subscriptions are pretty new in consumer-land.
But we need a different term rent seeking already has competing usages.
I think here you might be thinking of Regulatory Capture.
No, they don’t. That is neither a correct nor common use of the term.
With regard to intellectual property, "ownership" is effectively monopoly because nobody else has the right to produce the good. There might be "inferior" or replacements goods with pop music, but maybe not even that when it comes to things like patents.
However I disagree with your assertion that wealth is income generating property. If I store $5mm under my mattress, I have wealth without generating income: the wealth can be used to purchase a large amount of services over a sustained period of time, but it is not generating more wealth.
The argument about "private property" is not hard to understand, it is just confusing for many people because of the way we use the term in modern language. It is not only to be compared with public property, but also personal property: for example, the apartment I live in, or the comb I use to brush my hair. Interestingly, personal property is almost by definition a form of wealth which does not produce income/accumulate value. Here's a good explanation:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_property#Personal_ver...
That $5mm under your mattress is backed by bonds, income yielding bonds. That's why it's worth $5mm. If the country or bank that issues those bonds were defunct, the money would be worthless because the bonds would no longer be income generating.
You could say that gold is nonproductive wealth. Adam Smith sorta argued that gold isn't wealth. You could use a sack of grain as an example..
These examples are theoretical though. IRL, the majority of wealth is equity, bonds, real estate, etc. The value of that property is determined by the income it generates for its owner. If you really had that $5mm, it would probably be in equity, bonds, real estate, and generate a yield... like most wealth in the world.
Much of economics depends on expectation, there is nothing inherently logical about any of it.
This isn’t true. The $5mm is merely representational. The social dynamics that maintain it’s exchange value, i.e. security, is circumstantial. The security is exercised by way of capital.
>personal property is almost by definition a form of wealth which does not produce income/accumulate value.
This is ahistorical. In a capitalist society, personal property is a means to produce value all the same. Capitalism comprises relational circumstances that deem your toothbrush, comb, computer, school supplies, and your quiet home all as means to produce value.