OneBigLife on Nostr: THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MONEY AND WEALTH (): Middle-class leftists don't really ...

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MONEY AND WEALTH

(https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1811272099647967330):

Middle-class leftists don't really understand the difference between wealth and money.

That's because what they have is a job as a retarded commie journalist, which pays them money, which they put in the bank before spending it on Funko Pops, cannabis, dildos, and tofu.

They think wealth is "more money". And when they think about "more money", they think about all the Funko Pops they want but can't afford, and about how Elon Musk can afford more Funko Pops than he could ever use, that is if Funko Pops could be used for anything, which they can't, unless you count leftists' strange propensity for putting unexpected things in places they do not belong.

They don't understand that Elon Musk doesn't have some sort of special titanium credit bank card connected to a bank account with 260,000,000,000 munnies in it, for the buying of Funko Pops.

What he has is some businesses he started, and a bunch of dudes whose job it is to guess the value of things have arrived at the consensus that they are worth that much. That guess changes by the hour.

Leftists can't really wrap their heads around this idea, not in the intuitive sense that would allow them to engage with it as a concept. They can't imagine what it would be like to be in that position.

Why not?

Because if they could, they wouldn't be leftists. In fact, many people can, and therefore are not leftists, so leftists are really just the group of people who are self-selected for not being able to figure this out.

This is why they can, without blushing, describe "reusable space launch capability" as "unnecessary wealth".

They don't understand that if you took every share of SpaceX away from Elon Musk, and all the other shareholders, it would still be valued at 200 billion dollars (or whatever it is on the day you are reading this), but it would not magically transform into 200 billion one-dollar bills that you could give to left-wing journalists to buy more Funko Pops with. It would still be a bunch of factories, and designs, and offices, and employment contracts, and rocket engines, and stuff.

The reality is that the earn-spend-consume model of money that retarded leftist commie journos are familiar with has an upper limit. Once you've spent on much on yourself as you want, a ceiling which varies depending on your character, you need a new source of meaning and purpose in life.

You need to develop different ambitions.

Then your spending becomes not about what you want to have, but what you want to create. You build the things you want to see in the world.

This is where money becomes wealth. Money is used to buy things. Wealth is used to build things.

When you create something that a lot of people care about, it's valued at a huge amount of money, because money is a measure of fucks given.

So maybe, when you have enough money to buy a mansion and a yacht, you decide that what you really want is "reusable space launch capability", because you're a nerd who reads science fiction, and so you think it's a kind of dumb idea for humanity to spend all its time on one tiny dust speck in an infinite universe.

So you buy some computers and you hire some dudes who are good at designing things on computers, and then you buy some metal, and hire some dudes who are good at cutting metal and sticking it together, and pretty soon you're the proud owner of whole bunch of stuff.... computers and factories and tanks full of liquid oxygen and launch pads and most importantly, rocket boosters.

And no Funko Pops. Not a single one.

Now, it's worth more money than you started with, because the people who guess the value of things (it's called a "stock market") are starting to agree that this was maybe a pretty good idea.

So, on paper, you're richer than you ever were. But that's your not bank account, or your Funko Pop collection. That's the fact that you now control humanity's effort to leave the gravity well. And you control it because you built it in the first place.

Wealth inequality is a measure of technological progress.

It doesn't exist in low-tech societies where everyone is chasing antelope with a throwing stick and a stone-tipped spear. Because no one invents anything and there's nothing to own.

And it peaks in high-tech societies where enterprising people create entire economies ex nihilo by investing in a wild idea. Because things are being invented and people give a fuck about them, and so the innovators have a much higher net worth than the people who sit around eating processed snack foods and shopping for Funko Pops on the internet.

Reducing wealth inequality is a disaster, and typically requires one. If you reduce wealth inequality in a free market, you are either outright destroying growth enterprises, or transferring control of them to non-producers.

Which is what leftists really are. Useless journo flacks and cloistered academics who want to tear down the engines of tech innovation so they can buy more middle class consumer goods, until they tear down the engines that produce those, too.

The most important task in all of economics is keeping people who don't get shit done out of the way of people who do.

Leave humanity's orbital launch capability alone, Zaid.

It is already in the hands of the people who are best qualified to operate it. We know that because they are ones who built it in the first place.