No I didn’t miss this. That’s why I responded with this:
You say that the wealthy combine their resources. Are you suggesting that the wealthy carpool? That they go to the butcher in a group? They drive themselves or even hire people to drive them places in huge gas-guzzling machines with engines far larger than necessary, or they even fly, sometimes even in their own private planes unnecessarily.
Travelling in a group? They wouldn’t even consider it.
Seriously, I hear u, and the poor could be a lot more efficient with their money. But will that make them rich? Not a chance. In fact it will only drive down demand for higher pay and prices will go up because of this higher disposable income for the poor. I’m just saying you don’t understand what makes the rich rich - it’s not that they’re more frugal (lol!).
If anything, everyone needs to be spending MORE, not saving (which is a withdrawal from an economy). More spending means higher profits per time period, which means higher growth, which takes the pressure off trying to squeeze extra money from the poor just to keep things going. Do you understand this?
I understand Yes. Instead of carpooling, sharing butcher bills, they buy the companies together or contracts etc.
If We spend all our money on food and fuel, we can’t spend it elsewhere. Hoarding money causes collapse I know this. But, spending it all on one or two areas especially such major areas does the same thing. Transportation and food are the two major spending areas that can be pooled to increase spending strength. Then you have cost and demand. Do you see my points? I understand and can agree with yours.
This was what I took you to mean all along - so I do see your points afterall. I even agree that poorer people spend money in transportation and food that they could save. What I don’t agree with is that this would increase spending strength if they did.
At least, it wouldn’t increase spending strength if everybody followed your advice across the board - only if isolated pockets of people took your advice would they benefit relatively. If everyone did it, we would in fact damage everyone’s freedom to be as extravagant as we could currently be being said to be. See, if everyone had more disposable income from pooling resources, businesses could charge more for food and transportation without losing customers because they would be willing to pay more since they have the extra cash. I touched on this before, and it would just result in the former, more free and individual ways becoming unaffordable because now, only the cheaper co-operative methods would be viable for poorer people. They all lose out.
I will explain why this happens: money can be used in one of two ways.
Money can be used simply as money - to buy commodities that one uses/consumes like normal.
Money can be used as capital - to invest in a product/service that you don’t actually use/consume yourself, purely as a means to get you more money back than you put in.
The above mechanism, whereby frugality is rewarded only by reduced choice, happens because poorer people only use money in the first way. The mechanism could be altered if they just used their money in the second way: by becoming Capitalists and investing their money, saved through cooperation, even on a small scale.
However, a further dimension to this is that Capitalism fundamentally requires inequality such that power imbalances can result in one lot of people getting away with a “consentual” trade that ends up with another lot of people making a loss, in order for the profit to be made by that first lot of people that keeps Capitalism alive. As such, even a prudent turn towards Capitalism by the poor will not affect their relative standing. They will just be playing yet another game they cannot win, and remaining in their position of merely scraping by, trying their best to save a little better in yet another area of their life, only kept at this minimal level for the purposes of keeping the market and workforce alive for the few to profit from them.
The efficiency afforded by such a system comes at a price, and it fundamentally cannot be resolved without compromising on the economic freedom of the elite to profit from the poor through the use of money as capital (Capitalism).
Realistically, few will ever cooperate and even fewer will do so honestly. I agree with you. But, even your solutions rely on honesty and honorable behavior. I have zero faith in the population cordially cooperating without generational reeducation. The only countries right now that seem to get relative honesty out of their population are the ones that severely punish for what we think of as slight. Death for petty theft. Yet that only hides what exists within, it does not change the activity in the mind
True, so we won’t need to worry about the poor undermining themselves by following your advice to uniformly save and cooperate across the board. This is fine by me. I don’t think efficiency savings should be required of those who do not like such things. I’m more in favour of getting the best of all different kinds of lifestyles, attitudes and behaviours.
I don’t think I offered any solutions did I? - apart from much earlier in the thread when I proposed correcting perceptions of property and ownership in light of the social system as a whole, and I also advocated compromising on economic freedoms such as those that allow the economic ruin of many to enable the economic success of the very few. But when I went through various alternative scenarios and how they would pan out, none of them was meant as a recommendation of mine to solve any problems.
As far as any solutions of mine go, social freedoms need not be affected.