Work.
Inflation. The money you have is worth less every year by design. It’s a secret tax on all of us.
Tbf we should always aim for slight inflation. You want to incentivize people to use their money on things so it circulates, and it being slightly depreciating is the best way to do that.
If it was the best option long term to just stuff money into a mattress and sit on it for a decade then that has it’s own problems
Paying for education that “the market” wants us to have so they can have a larger pool of skilled workers, leading to lower salaries
Tax
Working harder instead of prioritizing.
Liberalism
Passive income. If value is being created and you’re being presented some of it without doing any work it necessarily means that someone else isn’t receiving the full value of the work they’re doing.
In most cases I agree with you, but what about a musician who makes passive income off of people streaming their music, or people who buy my fonts?
subset of capitalism
Absolutely
Or you’re squeezing all the value and more out of the asset and users, while increasing externalities
Sounds cool til you realize the assets being squeezed are mostly just other people
No no no. I gave them CULTURE! A wonderful work culture.
And security! Sure, not the security I decided I need for myself, and it’s only really present as long as they’re profitable to me, but security nonetheless.
After all, I had the idea and stuck my neck out to secure the financing, which is far more important than the actual daily labor that keeps things running.
We’re like a family, see.
Using non-free (proprietary) software and believing we are free to do anything we want with the software. But we can do only what the app (the devs) let us to do. We can’t see or edit the code of program to run as we wish.
Capitalism
Insurance.
Insurance- paying for something you might never need but required to be available JUST IN CASE. eyeroll
Then you’re denied it regardless.
correction, you do an ungodly amount of paperwork prior to getting denied.
And if you die you lose everything you paid for and your family gets none. Sounds great!
The Dutch East India Company is still alive and well.
The stock market
Only if you don’t have insider info.
Ending a price in .99 so you think it is a whole dollar less.
Ive always thought it was due tax related reasons. In México, most shops have it set up so the price + IVA (our consumer tax) gives you a rounded number.
But it works! Supposedly. Don’t poke holes in the JC penney story.
That’s because it’s so normalized we don’t even realize it’s a scam anymore.
college textbooks. have to have the latest edition for class, but almost nothing is different from the two-years-old one.
I once had a professor who gave assignments with the last several editions page numbers because he thought it was bullshit too.
in roughly half of my classes; my professors were the authors of the of the books that they were selling so they made photocopies of them to distribute to the student for free.
it was one of two benefits to attending the largest university in the country (at the time).
For my classes, anything that was graded was not done from the textbook it was either online questions or from a worksheet. Any work given from the textbook was just for our practice and not graded. They’d usually just call out sections of questions based on that day’s lesson.
This is why I try, if possible, to find them online for free. That’s been my first step whenever needed. Last time I needed a book and lab access code, it cost a little over $150USD!
Health insurance
Add to that the conflation of health insurance with health care. The former is, at best, a means for the latter. Although the reality is it’s more an obstacle or corruption of it.
Depends on the country I believe. I’ve got a refund for my sixth eye surgery a couple of months ago thanks to my insurance.
Wow, how do you manage? Like - do they even make glasses for people with that many eyes?
I laughed out loud in class at this
Private Equity
Credit Score
Derivitives
Interest on Loans
Money
Loan interests and money I disagree with. Unless we get to a point where everything is in abundance and commerce isn’t needed anymore I feel like a common item we can agree the value of for goods and services is a pretty neat idea.
Similarly I don’t think interest is inherently evil. If i lend you money to buy something large that will take years to pay off, I wouldn’t want to lose a bunch of money with inflation. But predatory rates that bet on you defaulting can burn in hell. It’s disgusting that the whole fintech industry exists purely to maximise interest and debt at the cost of those who depends on those services the most.
Money being necessary is incidental to how our society is structured. There’s a lot of ways society can and has functioned without a universal equivalent, regardless of the state of abundance.
Similarly, interest not being evil is actually fairly new and unique to modern society. It’s pretty common historically and in different cultural contexts for interest-free debt to be a norm.
Which suggests these norms are likely specific to capitalism and its ideology rather than universal common sense.
Graeber’s Debt and The Dawn of Everything are anthropological works relevant to this topic that you might find interesting.
Loan interest is one of the main reasons we operate in a “line-must-go-up” society right now. If you loan out money and require that that much money plus a percentage be paid back, you are requiring that money spent returns back a surplus somehow. Making even is considered a failure in this system.
yea and the enshittification of stuff is also a byproduct of chasing that compound interest, trying to satisfy that exponential growth is destroying the world.
There’s nothing wrong with that in theory. It’s just a way of making sure resources are being used in a productive way. But it doesn’t actually work that well.
You have a point, but originally interest was both compensation for the lander for offering you the loan, and a way to mitigate risk in case you fail to pay. Without interest, why would anyone lend a random stranger some money? Interest is basically the only things that props up an unsecured loan.
Without interest, why would anyone lend a random stranger some money? Interest is basically the only things that props up an unsecured loan.
believe it or not, it’s very common.
Generally you would loan someone money without interest because the result would be mutually beneficial. We already do this in smaller social circles like our families, and then our close friends. The problem is that most lenders arent local and dont live in the community. They have no shared interest with the borrower.
In some cases communities do come together and raise funds interest free, and use them for something that benefits society in some way, we just wouldnt describe it that way normally.
