Abolishing Capitalist Overlords: Inflationary Communism

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oliveoil: Apr 22, 2016

I might be a little manic right now.

But here's a thought.

Worker power is diminished via inflation. More workers = lower price for workers = workers get less of a share of the pie.

Workers try to save money and exit rat race by becoming a capitalist? Well your money gets inflated away.

Stock market? Too bad. The capitalists in the cool kids club get to inside-trade. IPOs are a way for the rich and connected to arbitrage over time when companies flip from private to public and the pool of permitted buyers skyrockets. So investing gains are stolen by the connected even if you make it out.

A smaller and smaller proportion of people ends up owning more and more of what is valuable in our society.

So what's the solution?

Shouldn't we abolish private property? I argue no, we already know that if we decrease the supply of a thing, the remainder becomes more valuable. Thus, the less private property there is, the more valuable it is, so we just grant even more privilege (more valuable property) to an even smaller group (those lucky or connected enough to preserve control over value).

What do the libertarians think? Just go back to a gold standard, or a Bitcoin standard they say. But again this just gives those who own lots of assets control over those who need to eat.

I think there is merit in fighting fire with fire.

Fight "their" inflation of our skills, our work hours, our money with inflation of their assets and everything the privileged use to control.

When everyone is privileged, no one is.

Air is so commonplace that it isn't sold in grocery stores and if it was, you'd never go to buy it. You can breathe for free (for now).

Do that with everything we depend on.

We have people volunteering their time in neighborhood soup kitchens but imagine if we had people volunteering their time to figure out how to make food as plentiful as air.

How to make quality housing as plentiful as air.

Do that with everything that is used against workers.

I don't care if it means 3D printed hydroponics for everyone. The tiniest thing could work for now.

This won't happen under capitalists' command because companies have an incentive to inflate workers at every turn - giving them alternatives to working for food would cause employees to quit and wages to rise.

So yeah that's pretty much it. Use economic incentives to attack the richest people where it hurts: their wealth and income. Inflate the things they use to coerce workers and ideally their assets as well.

When everything worth having is so common it's not worth having, nobody can get you to do something you don't want to do except through violence.