Is unearned income acceptable?

originally posted by: AnuTyr
a reply to: infinityorder

If the ghost towns don't prove the hilarious irony of the system i don't know what will.

maybe when people decide to sqatt or make their own towns and just * live * there.

We would really see just how free we are when the police and army comes to stop a new country from developing within.

And they would too.

Can't have regular folks getting ahead without paying their pound of flesh and pound of bone.

Now if the filthy rich want money....bailouts...quantitive easing ( which helped nobody but the super rich as it did nothing but artificially inject trillions into the stock market 90% of the population can't even afford to invest in.) Money is given to the rich without pause.....can't help the regular folks out though....we can't do that.

If they had taken the same bailout money and given it to working poor and middle to lower middle class workers....the economy would have been fixed the next day.

Mortgages paid up houses purchased cars purchased......no can't do that though, it would help everyone not just the already rich.

originally posted by: Tusks
To the "Pinko"s against landlords---buy your own property and then you won't have to pay rent. And you will also become familiar with the idea of personal responsibility.

Of course what you really want is to be given housing---and food, and medical care, and entertainment.

Without ownership of property(including weapons) , one is a slave---likely a willing slave at first, but still a slave. And perhaps one who is willing to kill or steal to achieve it.

Communism is insanity and murder at its core.

Hmm name calling oh my your scary.

I have owned two homes both for my personal use, not to profit off my fellow man. How is it you do not feel that inflated housing prices or high rent does not enslave society? You say communism is insanity and murder is at its core, yet you stipulate your need to own weapons?

My guns put food on the table and protect my family from 4 legged predators.

Once again I say; the article shows that wealth can be created or extracted and I do not claim that you have to do anything one way or the other, how is that communism? or even promoting communism?

a reply to: AlaskanDad

My weapons are for protection from the takers---theives, governments, and communists--and not for the taking of other people's property.

Anyone advocating against ownership or land/housing is supporting the main tenant of communism, and needs to accept the generally recognized labeling as 'Pinko" or fellow traveller.

a reply to: ketsuko

I am not an O'bummer fanboy, nor do I embrace either of the two corporate parties. imho one party says it will help the rich the other claims to help the people by giving to the rich.

Such is our government, take from the masses and give to the elite.

I have three rental homes and I'm not sure renters are worth the headaches. My lower rent house is the worst. One time they had a pet raccoon destroying the carpet. Never got paid for that one.
Took me five months to evict a lady because she had two minor kids. No rent for those months
Funny how she had money for smokes and beer.

Yeah,, unearned income.

a reply to: Tusks

OIC

Your weapons are for killing your fellow man, if they are part of a government or if you decide they are takers or communists?

How does that relate to the difference of wealth extraction vs wealth creation?

How is it that wealth creation rather than extraction earns one the tittles of pinko or communist?

Is it wrong to consider how your actions effect others?

Thinking only of ones self and not considering how it may effect others is the definition of a sociopath.

a reply to: ketsuko

a reply to: Hoosierdaddy71

No joke I feel for you, renters can be terrible! Some of those people would probably destroy their own home, and then lose it for back taxes.

My main point is there is a difference between wealth creation and extraction, I found the idea intriguing. I never had really considered making money in that that context, just plain interesting.

originally posted by: AlaskanDad
a reply to: Tusks

OIC

Your weapons are for killing your fellow man, if they are part of a government or if you decide they are takers or communists?

How does that relate to the difference of wealth extraction vs wealth creation?

How is it that wealth creation rather than extraction earns one the tittles of pinko or communist?

Is it wrong to consider how your actions effect others?

Thinking only of ones self and not considering how it may effect others is the definition of a sociopath.

That is the problem, so many sociopathic people are at the top of the financial system.

And it has trickled down to regular folks.

Now almost everyone doing well doesn't care about the good of all as long as they get theirs they don't care if everyone starves.

Even the mob didn't act this way, they would spread money around, even helping the poor.

It is very sad, and will be the end of our once great civilization.

originally posted by: AnuTyr
a reply to: Mandroid7

Making a small income well helping house the population is fine. I never said it wasn't. Expecially if you did something to revamp a place and make it liveable.

Contractors are defenantly the worst hit by this kind of economy. Sure there are some *Mega* contracting companies that do exactly what i described. And it leaves ghost towns LOL.

Fixing up old places for a living is a lot different than people who hunt property and just *sit* on it till the value goes up.

Right on, I get a little pissy, I hear a lot of people complaining about my profession. It seems the get rich quick people on tv have made some bad reputations. The work is brutal and getting through the price raising realtors is insane. Finding a good property in Florida has its own major setbacks, such as termites, mold, sinkholes, Chinese drywall that smells like suffer and eats the pipes and electrical, bugs etc...

I was a custom home builder for 18yrs, then got burnt out around the time of the crash...needed a change of pace, but investing in used homes and trying to sell them is probably an even bigger challenge, I often question my choice.

I agree with your statement about large corporation purchases and pool offers made between HUD and investors for hundreds of properties at once. I am fighting for homes between them and now the Chinese are buying them up like hot cakes.

There were some owner occupied restrictions proposed to help slow this issue to keep Florida from turning into a rental state, but I'm not sure if it passed.

a reply to: AnuTyr

For anarchists, capitalism is marked by the exploitation of labour by capital. While this is most famously expressed by Proudhon's "property is theft," this perspective can be found in all forms of anarchism. - See more at: www.infoshop.org...

and

At the root this criticism is based, ironically enough, on the capitalist defence of private property as the product of labour. As noted in section B.4.2, Locke defended private property in terms of labour yet allowed that labour to be sold to others. This allowed the buyers of labour (capitalists and landlords) to appropriate the product of other people's labour (wage workers and tenants) and so, in the words of dissident economist David Ellerman, "capitalist production, i.e. production based on the employment contract denies workers the right to the (positive and negative) fruit of their labour. - See more at: www.infoshop.org...

The subtitle of the above referenced website is:

"Unthinking repect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth"


...and keep up arguing. People simply cannot, or will not, understand that something else is possible. And I agree it is hard to get your head around ideas that are contrary to all you've ever known. The idea that 'Private Property' isn't the end all a be all of existence is hard to fathom but can be done.

The idea that production can be for 'use' not 'profit' is hard to image but worth taking the time to do so.

I always return to the movie "The God's must be Crazy" for knocking a hole in my capitalist worldview. I really did think that the only way people would do any thing was 'greed'. Now I see how pathetically lacking my young imagination was.

Keep fighting the good fight.

Bravo....

originally posted by: Jamie1

originally posted by: Edumakated
You mofo's need to go back to freshman year of college and study basic economics. Seriously. The constant drivel about the rich and how unfair it is that some people make investments is just tiresome. If any of you have a pension, 401k, or any other kind of investments you are making unearned income.

People invest their money hoping to get a return. There is a level risk associated as you may actually lose your money. You know that old adage of risk and reward. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

Choosing to invest in real estate or other asset classes hoping to get a return is not evil. The point is you see value in something that someone else may not. That asset's value increases and you reap the reward because you took the risk of investing your money (or leveraging up with a mortgage or other debt).

I bought a condo in a neighborhood that most people seemed to ignore, but I saw potential. Took out a 100% loan at the time to buy it. I maintained the property, shopped at my neighborhood stores, etc. Next thing you know, the neighborhood is all of a sudden really popular and my condo increased in value by $100k. I sold it and reaped the capital gain from selling a price higher than I paid. How is this evil? I could have also lost my azz by the value going down.

The alternative to investment income is ALWAYS being forced to trade your time for money.

Stupid.

No it isn't, trading your VALUE for money is different from trading your TIME for money. While time is generally required to generate value, time is also required to research and conduct investment. Hourly workers provide more value than they receive in return. That means every hourly worker out there is being leeched off from above.

Investments are gambling, plain and simple. "educated" gambling perhaps, but no different than being good at blackjack or poker. There is something seriously wrong with a system when the only way to be successful is to gamble.

The wealth gap in the US is continuing to grow, and the rate it's growing is speeding up. Be real for one minute and think, what do you think will stop this gap from growing? Nothing will. Not until it grows so large that the majority of people have a hard time feeding themselves or keeping a roof over their head.

Refusing to address this situation BEFORE it gets to extreme levels has only one outcome, violent revolution. Do all you defenders of the rich think they'll let you in their bunkers to ride out the storm? Or you just hope you'll be disgustingly wealthy by the time that comes, so you'll have a bunker of your own?

How far is too far? When 10 people own all the properly and 99.99% of the wealth in a country? 100 people?

There is a limited amount of wealth available, those that say otherwise are either ignorant or liars. When the overwhelming majority of that wealth is concentrated in an incredibly small minority, there simply is not enough to go around for everyone else. Regardless of how hard you work you can't obtain wealth that simply isn't available.

a reply to: AlaskanDad

I say that our real estate market is being artificially inflated by investment and this led to the 2008 bailout. The real estate market should have been allowed to fail which would have taken real estate values to their true market values.

Chiming in here from the States. Maybe it's different over there. It is not the investments by the end-users that caused the 2008 bailout. Repeal of Glass Steagle allowed commercial banks to package "risky" mortgages into fancy financial products that were then sold without abandon. The whole thing was a scam, and made a lot of people wealthy in the packaging of these products. You can not add an artificial stimulus to real estate , like expecting poor credit individuals to magically become responsible; and not know adjustments in the market are coming down the road. The low interest rate and anybody qualifies mentality, caused prices to sky-rocket. Just because you could use your house as an ATM did not mean things were going great, even though this is what you heard on CNN.

Around here, prices are almost back to 89 levels. A lot of people made money off of the "packaging and reselling financial instruments", but most of the common folks, who bought in at the boom were busted.

Some are upside down, which means they are paying off mortgages that are 10's of 1000's more than what they could possibly sell them for. If rate go up, many are still in adjustable rate mortgages.

My personal opinion is that as the dot-com crashed, the money had to go somewhere, but loosening up on mortgages like this and creating the boom was criminal; and, well thought out. In other words, we got fleeced; and, still no jail time for the perpetrators!

a reply to: grandmakdw

For a start, everyone from the richest person in the land, to the lowliest working stiff, pays taxes which go toward paying for social programs. All of us. Everyone. These taxes pay for schools, the NHS, and for benefits, most of which are paid to working families by the way. In fact, around 64 % of the nations population receive some sort of benefit.

As I mentioned, those of us who can work, and do (who still totally out number those who do not, or have never worked by a stunning majority), pay something into the taxation system in order that pensions are paid, without which our elderly would starve, freeze, and variously perish in the most appalling circumstances, that the NHS continue to run, meaning that everyone gets to use the facility without paying any money up front, and it USED to mean that education was paid for well after students had left school and moved into higher education. That is no longer the case to the same extent, which is yet another thing that makes me want to chew off the face of a conservative politician.

a reply to: Edumakated

Edumakated, you SOLD the property having made renovations to it which bought it up to a standard you were happy with correct?

That is not anything like, what we are talking about. That is a business proposition. Buying up land and property so that someone is beholden to you, and has to pay you rent however, without making any significant improvement to the buildings fabric, and infrastructure is not. It is just possessing a resource so that you can extort money from someone who needs the space more than you do!

a reply to: Edumakated

The only reason I cannot own my own home here, is because "investors" from London have bought the land rights for most of the appropriately sized property down here. Also, I work here in a family business, so aside from the fact that the same things which stop me renting or buying here, will prevent me from doing so else where because it stands to reason that if I cannot afford six hundred pounds a month for a pokey apartment, then I cannot afford a moving van, or a six or three month deposit in another town.

a reply to: Mandroid7

And that is not what we are talking about Mandroid. What you are doing there is buying up and improving property, and selling it on. That is just good solid work, and you should be paid for your time and your effort. You are not just buying property, then passing it on having done nothing with it!

a reply to: ketsuko

Now Ketsuko....the Federal Reserve has kept the interest rate at near 0% for a reason. Trust them. You are not to save at this moment of time; according to the Government, you must spend. Spend like you have the money to do so!

a reply to: grandmakdw

Well, why do social programs exist? There are two primary reasons.

1) People are not paid their worth
2) Poverty is next to impossible to escape.

Let's focus on the first one there. Let's say you have the average Wal-Mart worker. They're an adult between the ages of 25 and 40, most likely married with at least one child. It is not a "slouch" job. You are running ll over your department at all times, attending customers (who are often the worst people imaginable, for some reason.) You are often shifted to other departments as well. You work unpaid overtime. If you or your kid gets sick, well, good luck on the job market buddy. And what are you pulling for this job? minimum wage. Since minimum wage is not keyed to inflation in any state and certainly not federally, it doesn't keep up with the market, meaning you actually get poorer as time goes on.

Is it because Wal-Mart can't afford better wages and more sane workloads? No, of course not, the Waltons make one of the wealthiest families in the United states. They're inundated with tax breaks and incentives, to the point where they are actually receiving more government monies than they spend in taxes, regulatory fees, or the like. No, they pay the workers minimum wage, with mad hours and unpaid overtime, with no job security whatsoever and zero benefits, because that squeezes every last drop of profit out of those workers. if it were legal, you can bet those workers would be 24-7 on-call and paid in company scrip.

So it's not that Wal-Mart can't afford good pay and regular hours or even - gasp! - benefits! Rather, it's that Wal-mart turns a slightly bigger margin of profit by not doing so. As a result, the workers are being exploited; the wealth they produce (their labor) is being withheld from them by their employer, who doles out a pittance of it only because the law requires it (and there's enough stories of paychecks being "withheld" to show that the company will try to evade that if possible as well.)

And of course it's not just Wal-Mart. not by a long shot. Most businesses operate on this model, to varying degrees. After all, you can't bring home bacon to your shareholders, if you're not paying your workers less than they produce for you, right? If you pay workers what they produce, then you have to get your profit at the sales end, which is often a much smaller margin than you can get by ripping off your workers.

But it's noit just workers' wages we have to consider, but also externalization of other costs. pollution is an easy example. It's actually less expensive to pay a fine for dumping into the watershed, than it is to not do so. And that's all you have to do is pay the fine. Which you cn lower or even annul with litigation. The cost is externalized; either you pay a fine and skootch up prices for the consumer, or you evade the fine, and those same consumers now have polluted water. either way your cost is externalized to the consumer (who are very often your own workers) and you get a nice sheet to bring back to your investors.

Social programs then, are essentially a stopgap measure in this madness. An effort by the government to preserve a workforce, in an environment that by its very nature degrades and dissolves that workforce through attrition. An environment that, unfortunately, has even more government support (remember those tax breaks and incentives I mentioned? The fines that are cheaper than the methods to avoid them?) than the workforce does. These programs exist to try to make up the difference between what a person puts in (usually quite a lot) and what they get out (usually very little.)

Very few people collecting benefits from the government are slackers, sitting on their butts watching TV and doing nothing. Of those few that aren't working while on the dole, most are handicapped in some way that prevents them from being a part of the workplace. and of the remainder, who we would call "cheats," every cent they receive is pushed back into the marketplace, which provides some amount of economic stimulation to their local community (a vast difference from, say, squirreling the money into a tax haven bank account in Bermuda...) Thus even the "cheats" are doing something useful, even if only accidentally.

Your example, and the examples coming from some other posters here, isn't even within the scope of discussion here. You think selling a house for a few thousand gain is the subject here? Having a 401k? You must also think winning a nickel at the penny slots is being a high roller, then. No, while all profit is by nature extractive, there's quite a difference between turning a profit because someone agrees to buy your house for more than you put into it, and turning a profit because you are buying slave labor-made items and using a vastly underpaid workforce to sell them at a 700% markup.

originally posted by: TheTengriist
a reply to: grandmakdw

Well, why do social programs exist? There are two primary reasons.

1) People are not paid their worth
2) Poverty is next to impossible to escape.

Wrong.

1) People are paid what they are worth. Wages are the result of supply and demand in a free market. Only when you have wage controls do wages not represent what they are worth. When the supply of low skilled workers exceeds the demand for them you get low wages. This is why in some areas fast food only pays minimum wage while in other areas the very same low skilled job might pay $15/hr. This is why athletes make a lot of money. Actors make a lot of money. Certain business people make a lot of money. The value you provide to the business has to exceed your cost. A typical minimum wage worker may only be generating $10/hr in actual value to the employer. If that employer suddenly has to start paying $15/hr that workers value still is at $10/hr. Therefore, the business is going to either fire that person or look for other ways to increase productivity such as by utilizing technology instead. They may also have to raise prices which causes inflation.

2) Poverty is not next to impossible to escape. What you are missing is that most people are mobile between classes. The poor in one year are not the exact poor people in the next year. Most people are able to move up the class ladder through hard work, education, etc. Even if that person cannot escape poverty, if they do the right things, their children typically will be able to.

A good example of this is my own family. My grandfather was a share cropper, never learned to read, and had a third grade education. However, he knew education was the key. Despite raising my father in the middle of Jim Crow south, my dad still go a great high school education. My dad became a fireman and the a policeman and right into the lower middle class. My dad taught me the same thing. Education is important, get some skills, work hard, etc. I went to college and then a Top 3 business school. I'm solidly a 1 or 2%er income wise now.

With that said, there are people who suffer from generational poverty. Most of these folks, particularly in the US, can't move up because they get sucked into the poverty life where having children out of wedlock is the norm, dropping out of high school, and a whole host of other cultural dysfunctional factors that prevent them from moving up. This is exacerbated by the fact that our economy is getting harder to compete in when you are not educated due to technological advancements and global competition.

The social programs you mention are available because politicians realized they could buy votes with other people's money. We now have one party (Democrats) whose entire platform is pretty much based on taking from one person and giving to another. The programs have been ineffective and in many cases serve to trap people in poverty. Govt has spent a trillion dollars on the war on poverty and made ZERO progress in eradicating poverty over the past 50 years.