Joe Biden Love Thread

[jwb]

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Alright let's just break this down whether you're a member of the English monied people in the 1700s or 1800s vs. whether you're an American monied person in the same timeline to give an idea of the opportunity open to people and how a frontier can make a serious difference in the amount of capital necessary to build generational wealth.

Say you're a person of wealth with seed money but not top crust and looking to build your fortune in England at this time. By this time England's economy is already well built up and if you want to build an empire of selling wheat or potatoes then you're going to be competing with hundreds or even thousands of years of entrenched business practices without much space to grow cause people have been cornering the England market for a long time. like there just isn't

So the most obvious solution is to take your seed money to the frontiers of the empire, Africa or Asia or wherever where markets aren't as established and where seed money can make a bigger impact and the possibilities are more endless. But these frontiers are far far away and require great amounts of startup capital to account for the distance.

Now say you're an American with the same seed money. The frontier is on your doorstep, the government is big on quick expansion and offering pennies on the dollar on acres of land because they're trying to settle a frontier that is seemingly endless and right ****ing there. For far cheaper value than an English venture capitalist you can obtain vast tracts of land/capital to build wealth because the frontier is relatively close and able to repopulate and therefore more valuable.

You have two groups of people with potentially equal amounts of wealth and drive, but the latter simply has more opportunity to accumulate wealth.

Flash forward to now and comparing different income brackets in America and their access to the current economic frontier (whether it be finance or the internet or whatever). Seemingly different circumstances since we're not comparing at least potentially equal wealth within different societies but the similarity is comparing different access to frontiers of wealth.

If you are someone with wealth to finance the creation of Amazon or whatever the **** does it god damn matter if an enemy can open a general store?

I mean this seems like a rather drawn out analogy that is just meant to simply demonstrate that circumstances can easily make you more likely to succeed. You are seemingly referring to generational wealth as the overriding circumstance here but I would argue the same sort of right place right time type circumstances apply just as much. Just like the American settlers you can find yourself in an undertapped frontier that allows more room for success just by cornering markets that were previously being ignored, like Jobs/Gates did with the personal computer. I just think that all these factors can potentially go into explaining the success of a capitalist, but like I said the real distinction between a big wig and a mom and pop owner is the success. Theoretically, a small business that is successful enough can become a large business. Why would the guy who could start Amazon care about the guy with the general store? Because the specific general store I was talking about turned into ****in Walmart. That's why.

[jwb]

Originally Posted by elphenor

idk according to you, being a Dentist makes you bourgeois because you might employ an assistant

You are misunderstanding me as well. My entire point was that the worker/ owner distinction doesn't necessarily describe income based class distinctions accurately. A business owner/capitalist isn't necessarily part of the upper class, was my entire point. It's you who keeps mistakenly conflating the two and thinking that if the business is small enough it ceases to be a real business and the owner magically becomes a worker.

The dentist owning their own small practice would in fact make them a business owner. But it wouldn't make them wealthy or part of the true elite.

[jwb]

Originally Posted by elphenor

Marx from the Manifesto

I read this to mean the middle class kids itself, but belongs to the proletariat including...shopkeepers

however you could read this to mean a few things

vague enough and out of context enough that it feels like a Christian quoting scripture lol

Like I said I could see you making the argument that maybe if they don't have employees they are in some third category but other than that, the worker/owner distinction quite simply refers to the internal power dynamic within the business, not how large the business is or how wealthy their owner is. Regardless of how small a business is, the person who owns it is the owner and the people they pay to work there are the employees.

[Frownland]

Originally Posted by jwb

Did I mention I used a tracfone?

I already agreed with the bit about it being a bandaid if you don't fix the costs. I didn't even say "any form of addressing the issue of college debt would only help the middle class."

I said that I'm guessing more middle class and upper middle class people have a lot of student debt than people who are lower class since they go to uni a lot more so I bet they have more debt to be forgiven. That's what I assumed elph meant when he said it could be called regressive and I was just saying I could see that point not even that it was my main concern.

I would think when you say "any form of addressing the issue of college debt" that would also include lowering prices or having free college so there's not so much debt to be forgiven in the first place. Otherwise poor people will largely continue to be priced out of universities even if you decide to forgive the debt of those who manage to make it in.


I think your last sentence seems reasonable... hopefully it's a precedent that gets built on but if not and it's just one time debt forgiveness then it really doesn't hurt anyone and at least it helps some people.

to be fair the worker/owner distinction offers up ambiguities of its own. The idea that Elon musk is a capitalist and Apu from the Simpsons is a capitalist and therfore they are part of the same strata of society seems pretty questionable to me.

In that one abstract sense they are but I don't think that one sense fully embodies the way we actually experience class. Class seems to imply a sort of mixture of wealth and social status. A millionaire who made all their money playing sports is of a higher status in our society than a small business owner with a single corner store, despite the owner/worker distinction. The millionaire will be treated better in virtually every way other than the one you identified, so it seems wrong to say the owner is necessarily of a higher class just by virtue of being an owner.

Similarly, while I largely agree the starkest and most socially significant class distinction is between the bottom 99 and the top 1%, I don't think that somehow means the difference in lifestyle between the poor and middle class isn't also large enough to meaningfully distinguish.

I get your point about them "adopting the asthetic" of the bourgeois but to me it's more than that. Having twice as much money isn't just an appearance. IIRC I've heard something like after 70k a year it caps off in terms of how much happier money makes you but before that it makes an obvious difference just in terms of not being stretched quite so thin financially. Which makes sense since obviously the less you make, the more of a difference an additional 10k a year can make in your life.

I'd clarify but you don't care.

[jwb]

That is true. And well worth the wait.

Edit: this was in response to frownlands post before he edited. He pointed out that Apu is a cartoon.

[jwb]

Originally Posted by Frownland

I'd clarify but you don't care.

Lol... this is possibly the most emo debate tactic I've ever seen frowny.

[The Batlord]

Gimme a little bit of time to respond to this as I'll actually have to do a little bit of research on ****ing Wal-Mart to give a meaningful response, but I will say that my previous post isn't saying that only specific levels of wealth in all times and places are capable of producing greater wealth. There are times and places where you can have less SEED MONEY and do greater things wit it. Post WW2 America, when a destroyed world economy allowed America to hold half the world's wealth and where the New Deal actually redistributed a degree of wealth to the middle and lower classes that they hadn't had access to previously. Also the invention of the standardized shipping container around the Vietnam War allowed for far greater and far cheaper international trade than ever before, an economic frontier that made Walmart's success far more possible than just hard work and good decision making.

Again that's not a full response but just some food for thought for now as I think your Wal-Mart example seems reductive.

[jwb]

Lol... it's not even about specifically Walmart. Are you ruling out that a small business can grow into an empire or is your only point that this is exceedingly unlikely? Cause that's all I'm really trying to drive at with these examples.

[jwb]

Like with the Vietnam Nam thing and the shipping containers... let's say you're right and they lucked out and that made their business possible. What even is your point? Remember I wasn't saying the cliche trope of through enough elbow grease anything is possible or that they are the sole authors of their own success. So the fact that you are bringing this up sorta gives me the impression one of your motivations is to convey that they don't deserve credit for said success. But that is actually besides the point in this case.

[The Batlord]

Of course it's not a black and white view, you idiot, nor is it a conspiracy of the rich, but the level of money needed to build money-making system (aka a business) grows with the level of economic development as competitors grow, fail, spread, and monopolize. It's new economic frontiers that allow for those who can't afford to break into the pre-existing markets to have a chance to develop their own foothold but the more developed the markets in general the more SEED MONEY is required even for developing in new economic frontiers.

Bill Gates got funds from his family but still used non-copyrighted software made by enthusiasts to develop his computers and operating system because computers were largely an untapped frontier.

Bezos was shut out of that frontier by the 90s because Microsoft was already a mega company but he could exploit the internet as a way to sell people ****, but that required so much startup capital that Amazon wasn't even profitable for years.

And now that computers as a general concept is a tapped market and using computers to do useful things is also kind of tappe you now see galaxy brained tech bros desperately trying to find the next computer frontier and inventing crypto and NFTs because the obvious avenues of monetizing computers are already taken and even though there isn't really a use case for any of that **** the energy use of all those servers doing crypto **** is as much as a country. If an actual use case that people latch onto is found then how many new servers will you need?