Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

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In a basic sense, that's what all wealth is. Income generating property. Debt produces interest. Company shares produce dividends Real estate earns rent. Capital produces revenue. It's all quite interchangeable.

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.

Intellectual property didn't used to be rent seeking. It's a relatively recent phenomenon where you can no longer buy-to-own, you can only subscribe-to-use.

Virtually every company is moving toward this model - Microsoft, Adobe, Disney, etc. That's my main complaint.

Depends on what you mean by "rent seeking."

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.

Rent seeking [0] typically means exploiting a captive market without providing value. I don’t think that fits either of your definitions. The key piece is they basically squeeze without proving value. So buying IP and then upping the rent fits that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

>they usually mean large companies trying to get goodies from the state

I think here you might be thinking of Regulatory Capture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Property(intellectual and otherwise) enforcement _is_ a goody from the state, by the by

> Liberal economists use this term the most, they usually mean large companies trying to get goodies from the state.

No, they don’t. That is neither a correct nor common use of the term.

A very large number of early economists railed on rentiership (Adam Smith, Herny George, of course Marx).

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...

There are all sorts of practical exceptions, but it's still all backed by income generating wealth.

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.

No, the millions is not backed by bonds. It is a complex topic, but Brazil stopped their inflation by issuing a new currency and implementing price controls.

Much of economics depends on expectation, there is nothing inherently logical about any of it.

With regard to any property, ownership is a monopoly or oligopoly, so long as more of identical or equivalent good cannot be easily produced. Ownership of land, or natural resources, is the same in that regard.

>If I story $5mm under my mattress, I have wealth without generating income.

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.

I genuinely googled Mark Engels to see who he was - I was guessing a friend of Brian Eno.

Now I get it.

And yes, the commons may well be becoming more of the world than the private world. interesting idea

Ha! (fixed, thanks)

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