Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"

In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.

At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).

We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.

Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money

That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.

Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.

I don't think you even have to go to the extreme of compelling someone to do something through the legal system. I can use money to get someone to clean my house or walk my dog - they don't have to do it, but the fact that I have money does give me the power to get them to do what I want.

Absolutely--This was just an example that came to mind in the moment.

Can you compel someone to walk your dog because you have enough money to pay someone to do it, or are they choosing to do it to earn some money?

i mean... if people don't get money they die so....

So if they want to live, they are compelled to do some sort of work somewhere at some point, which is the nature of the human condition (along with all other living beings).

That doesn't mean you can force them to work for you specifically because you have the amount of money you deem sufficient for a specific task.

It feels like a lot of people have forgotten that this is how nature works, not that all of your needs are the responsibility of everyone around you.

You’re incorrect that being compelled to do work in order to survive is the nature of the human condition and all other living beings.

There is nothing natural about being compelled to work to live It is an artificial and constructed state.

It’s why there are people who have NEVR had to work to live and never will have to.

No, I am not wrong. A person in isolation must work to survive. If they don't, they will die of starvation, thirst, or exposure.

I will never understand why people believe that should change when a person lives around others.

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Of course it does. Call the cleaning service, see if your money can't compel someone to come clean your house while you sit on your ass. Or more indirectly, try to picture the chinese kid making your shoes for a meager wage, and try to explain what, if not your money, is compelling them to do so this menial, repetitive and unfulfilling task for you.

What the hell are you talking about?

> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.

Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

> What the hell are you talking about?

I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.

Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.

I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.

> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.

What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.

> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money

That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.

> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.

Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.

> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.

You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.

> You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.

That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.

As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.

The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.

I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com