I find it a touch strange, in the abstract, that a corporation being public is a bad thing. On paper it should be a good thing; being publicly owned should mean that your corporation has turned from a private business venture into effectively public infrastructure that's impossible to boycott and depended on to some extent by everybody. As a result, financial statements should be (and are) public and transparent, and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own like 90% of stocks, and the top 1% own 50%. While the poorest 50% of the population own about 1% of the stock market.
So "publicly" traded (the term public ownership can be confusing because it can also mean state control) just means it's open for the elite to invest in.
Could you link to how that measurement was taken? Because I very much want to know whether it counts things like mutual funds, or whether it only measures direct ownership of stocks. E.g. I have a bunch (though not all) of my retirement savings in an index fund that owns partial shares of the top 500 US companies (as listed by Standard & Poor's). So depending on how that S&P 500 fund is measured in those statistics, I either own shares in the top 500 companies, or I'm counted as not owning any shares. The latter would produce a very misleading statistic, because I am very much not the only person who invests in the stock market via mutual funds.
So a link would be much appreciated, in order to judge the quality of the info. As it is, I'm skeptical that the info is accurate, precisely because mutual funds are so wildly popular among the middle-class people I know (none of whom are in the top 10%, though most of them would likely be in the top 50%).
Well, considering that it doesn't seem to be an accurate statement, it shouldn't be so amazing that people don't "get" it.
By far, the largest shareholders in most publicly-traded firms are "institutional investors", but those are themselves in turn usually acting as middlemen managing mutual funds, most of which consist of ordinary folks' 401(k) plans and pensions.
What? "Doesn't seem to be an accurate statement"? What part? Those numbers are actually conservative. According to Yahoo Finance[0], it's actually 93% of the stock market is owned by the wealthiest 10% of American households. And the bottom 50% of Americans own ~1%. You "seem" to be mistaken and you're talking out of your ass.
The article you're citing doesn't link to its sources, but seems to be talking about direct stock ownership by households, and not explicitly stating how it's accounting for investment funds.
Have you considered the possibility that 401ks and pension funds etc are included in those numbers?
Open for the elite in the way that everyone else don't have enough money to matter.
The richest people are so much richer than everyone else that there's no comparison. You could grab a million average people off the street and all of you combined probably wouldn't be richer than Jeff Bezos. Think about that. This one guy is wealthier than a million other people combined, literally wealthier than an entire small country or large city, and he's not alone. There's more of them.
Those guys rule the world, everyone else are passengers.
Not sure what does that mean.
Americans poor and wealthy are in the top 10% of the world wealthiest and own a huge part of the world stock value accordingly.
That's simply capitalism, money is spread unevenly across everyone, that does not make everyone an elite
Is that a bad thing? Why would I want someone who can't even manage their own money to manage my life savings?
If anything I'd expect a company where the decisions are in the hands of 99% John Smiths and 1% Warren Buffets to be even more short sighted, *especially* when it comes to splurging on dividends.
"The major reason is they are a private company with good business..."
This is unquestionably, undoubtedly incorrect. It is a really low information meme that's racing around the Internet right now. If you want a contemporary counterexample take a look at NASCAR. They're also not publicly traded, they're family owned, yet they are abusive toward drivers, teams and fans, and they're gradually ruining the sport that made them rich. We know all of this because it got so bad Michael Jordan decided to sue them and there's a ton of information coming out in discovery at the moment.
The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment (not really, but yes they're doing some amazing stuff for Linux) is because they feel threatened by Windows and Microsoft, they perceive a long term competitive threat to Steam. Competition makes businesses both private and public work for your dollar. The US economy has been characterized by a decrease in competition and an increase in monopolies for decades now which is the root of many price hikes and anti-consumer practices.
>The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment
Ok, but this “at the moment” has lasted at least since 2011. Basically my whole adult life Valve gas been a pretty great company delivering value and not being annoying.
> The real reason Valve are being the "good guys" at the moment
Yep. Valve is seen as virtuous because Microsoft is greedy and the default Windows 11 install is generally viewed as a tire-fire of an OS
Are they doing good things for Linux? Absolutely. As a long-time Linux user I am over the moon that we are where we are. But the general populaton only gives a shit because Microsoft is abusive.
I do overall agree that Valve is only situationally the good guy here, but they do also have a sustainable approach to business and growth which I think helps this.
Monopolies need to be restricted by regulations. In micro economics there is a term marginal cost, and economy of scale. In the software as a service era, the cost of serving one extra customer is minimal, so it make economic sense for such companies to grow infinitely. This is why our current system do not work. As the best strategy is to become as big as possible and capture the entire market.
There is a bit of a debate about what to call the American economic system these days, but I think we should all agree it's not a capitalist one. It's not one that Adam Smith would look at, approve, and say oh yeah baby that's exactly what I was writing about in Wealth of Nations.
It looks a lot closer to the economic policies of the most successful fascist regimes - the best term for modern American economics might be "democratic fascist." There is a facade of a market economy, but there's heavy intervention to privilege not just domestic businesses, but a specific set of big ones that have close ties to the ruling party. This is not much different from how Hitler and Mussolini approached economic policy. Basically have your system revolve around private ownership, pretend to have a market economy but actually make very centralized decisions and execute them through a small number of private oligarchs you're buddies with. The uniquely American flavor is that there are two parties which do this instead of one (but three would be unimaginable), and you can choose which pack of bandits you signal loyalty to without being executed.
I find it interesting that this "feature" of the US (having those big monopolies) is often mentioned as a "weakness" of e.g. Europe, where companies cannot get as big (I guess partly due to regulations).
And in turn, when US companies "lose" against, say, Chinese companies, they will say it's because they get help from their authoritarian system (through the government). Which is a bit ironic given that the US monopolies do exactly that to the rest of the western world, right?
On the spectrum of authoritarian oligarchy of the type you describe, from 0 (liberal democracy with well regulated free market capitalism) to 100 (totalitarian oligarchy), where would you put: The USA; The average EU country; Russia.
I think there should perhaps be a law that any corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the employees. Everybody with an employment contract with this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less; whether they're the janitor or the CEO.
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
How much is a vote worth in dollars? Because there would be a market for those votes, not just a spot market for dollars or internal market using vacation days, it would be reflected in salary and benefits and company policy etc.
Couldn’t you just make the voting anonymous to make sure that buying votes isn’t possible? Why wouldn’t I just take your money and still vote however I like?
A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.
It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
I think you’ll find that won’t actually work in practice. Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but actually employees of a different company who contracts the work out as a whole.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.
You can at least in part blame Milton Friedman for this mess. His reframing of ficudiary duty as profit maximisation in his "shareholder theory" has done a tremendous amount of damage. The wariness of people when it comes to public companies is a direct consequence of this.
>and the company should be able to be externally steered via regular elections in a manner that benefits the public and not just its founders.
Why would anyone believe that this means an organization is well run, or to everyone's benefit? Here in Germany we're notoriously unfriendly to public companies, most of the (well functioning) Mittelstand is private and family owned. And I pray to god it stays that way because I'd rather trust a company whose leaders have their family name and reputation staked on it for the next three generations than I do the amorphous blob called "the public". As Kierkegaard said, in the crowd nobody is responsible.
If you want to see what happens under public ownership visit a public bathroom. I don't want anything externally steered by nobody in particular, I want something steered by a handful of people with names and addresses.
My understanding of the contemporary argument against publicly traded companies, though I'm not completely convinced of them personally, are that the fiduciary obligations inevitably drive those bad behaviors, and/or that shareholders often demand short term returns at the expense of long term value.
As far as "fixing" the problem, I think it would be important to expand voters' influence over the company in addition to voting changes like you described. I don't know how to make it feasible, but IMO voters should be able to influence or directly decide much lower level business decisions than they currently do
It's a common pattern. If you're in their service area compare both the food served by, and the employment practices of In-n-out Burger (private) vs McDonald's (public).
> (There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
You mean the special class B shares that gives 10 votes per share, right? It isn't just Google though. Facebook and Snapchat also do the same thing, iirc?
Share classes can be very varied(such as preferred shares that get what's left after bond debt is paid off on bankruptcy) but generally what he's proposing(a coop-style one-head-one-vote class) is not common. Not sure if it's legal for US corporations or not(I could swear it is but in any case it's exceedingly rare).
The usual principle is one-share-one-vote.
Not really. Most people have terribly low time preference. Democracy for example is a very bad idea when you account for that (read Hoppe for a detailed explanation). Public company ownership is much better because it doesn't suffer from one vote per person, but still susceptible to much of the same management problems, specially in a society that already favors lower time preference by other means.
I do not deeply disagree with your statement but I do not see the two as exclusive.
I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.
Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
fwiw, Hoppe has become a darling of the extremist authoritarian "alt-right" (curtis yarvin, etc) but has been rejected by more mainstrean thinkers including most libertarian factions.
Yes, exactly. It's kind of a wink-wink nudge-nudge at this point. A company citing "public good" under the guise of "shareholder value" is not actually supporting the public good at all.
Not that I condone capitalism, or socialism, or communism, or fascism, or any ism for that matter. Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ism, he should believe in himself.
But a private company, at this point, can arguably affect the greater good just as much as a public company. The rich are getting richer, and the corporate model is just there to support that transfer of wealth.
McDonald’s will not let you work 40 hours a week, or any consistent schedule at all. You will show up when they tell you to and that’s that. Same with grocery stores or most retail jobs.
Also you’re neglecting the cost of transportation (almost certainly a car, with gas and insurance), rent, and medical expenses.
Since everyone's spitballing their idea of AGI, my personal take is that AGI should be a fully autonomous system that have a stable self-image of some sort, can act on its own volition, understand the outcome of its actions, learn from cause-and-effect, and can continue doing so indefinitely.
So far, LLMs aren't even remotely close to this, as they only do what they are told to do (directly or otherwise), they can't learn without a costly offline retraining process, they do not care in the slightest what they're tasked with doing or why, and they do not have anything approximating a sense of self beyond what they're told to be.
I feel like that’s a bit harsh, but I’ll admit that it is needlessly inflammatory. I wasn’t in the best state mentally when I wrote that. (I do sometimes worry that I’m responsible for the disappearance of Paul C. Pratt…) At some point I need to either rewrite it to be less hostile or just yank it entirely.
Update: Now that I'm off work, I’ve removed the big rant about mini vMac’s code and sanded off the snark from the rest. I should have done this years ago, and I never should have added that in the first place.
I stopped reading when we got to sarcastic hate-compiling. That whole part could be a thoughtful and compassionate discussion of the state of Mac emulators, and would be much more persuasive if it were, and instead it reads like a blog-length dunk tweet.
> I feel like that’s a bit harsh, but I’ll admit that it is needlessly inflammatory.
You're asking for a courtesy here that you failed to extend to others.
When you write a hit piece on someone's hobby volunteer code, and then you get called out for being unduly mean, I don't think you get to complain people are being harsh to you. You chose to devote hours of your time to dismantling something someone put years of effort in, entirely as a fun hobby. (Antique Mac emulation is certainly not the highway to riches.) You say 'inflammatory', like the issue here is that you're slightly heated and passionate. No, the issue here is that the piece boils down to bullying other people because their fun hobby projects don't meet your esoteric standards ('no Github releases!').
> I wasn’t in the best state mentally when I wrote that. (I do sometimes worry that I’m responsible for the disappearance of Paul C. Pratt…)
Nothing about your mental state gives you licence to bully others. Their emotional states are no less important than yours.
To clarify, at the time I was aiming for the tone of Tantacrul's popular and well-received videos about poor software UX. (In particular, the MuseScore video is a good comparison; that was also an open source passion project.) Light-hearted ribbing / frustration venting mixed with genuine compassion toward the project's creator and his remarkable effort. Clearly I wildly missed the mark there. I'll try my best to avoid things like this happening again in the future.
Look, yes, you did wildly miss the mark. But I respect you owning that.
I think the MuseScore video is reasonably good reference for doing that sort of critique right. I'd gently point out two things. One, the MS video takes time to first explain what good UX is and why it's good, gently winning the viewer over with positive examples. Then it contrasts MS against best practice, relying on that earlier set-up work to ensure the viewer can follow along and see how MS is not quite hitting that mark. Two, it never denigrates MS; instead, it repeatedly affirms the author's enthusiasm for the product. It comes across as fairly compassionate and constructive criticism. Your piece, irrespective of its intent, didn't come off that way.
If you do want to do more criticism in the future, the MS video is a good point of reference. But I would hasten to add that good criticism is genuinely very hard. It takes work to do it right. It's not enough to simply be compassionate, you also have to demonstrate that compassion by weaving it into the final work of criticism. It must be a constant thread from start to finish, not a box one ticks off at the start or end.
A second option is to avoid criticism as such. Your piece could have easily been reframed as 'Mac emulation is really cool, built by these absolute legends, but none of these tools are quite right for me, so I made this fork that scratches my itches, and you might like it too!'. It gets the exact same points across, but does so much more gently.
That's not to say there isn't, at times, place for criticism strictu sensu. There is. But criticism is most effective when it is most constructive. Less cathartic, maybe, but catharsis at the expense of others is hardly something to aspire to.
I've taken the time to browse some more of your site and I think there's some really cool stuff on there. Don't be discouraged, or fall into the trap of being defensive, you have worthwhile things to say. Just do it with the same thought, patience, and compassion you'd want others to extend to you.
It wasn’t that bad. It cut a few scenes but most of the movie is still there perfectly intact. It even won film festival awards. The movie mostly flopped in the US market on account it being distributed on a very low budget limited release against Rambo and The Goonies. SpaceHunterM on YouTube made a good video explaining a lot of misconceptions, if you want to check that out.
It’s Blackstone that’s investing in single-family homes, not BlackRock. They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock. Easy mistake to make.
Also, there was absolutely inflation before Bretton Woods, and significantly worse inflation at that. See, for example, the hyperinflation during Weimar Germany which led to WWII. Or the nearly 10% deflation in the US during the Great Depression, which just exacerbated the effects by severely discouraging investment that would have helped kickstart the economy again. Post-Bretton Woods, major currencies are generally substantially more stable and predictable.
The Weimar hyperinflation wasn't caused by gold's limitations - it was the inevitable result of political cowardice and monetary arson. After WWI, Germany made the fatal decision to abandon gold convertibility and fund reparations through the printing press, transforming the mark from 4.2 to $1 in 1914 to 4.2 trillion to $1 by 1923. This wasn't some unavoidable monetary phenomenon but a deliberate policy choice to avoid fiscal responsibility. The Great Depression tells a similar story of government malpractice rather than gold standard failure. During the Roaring Twenties, the Federal Reserve artificially suppressed interest rates, creating massive distortions in credit markets and fueling the stock bubble. When the inevitable correction came, instead of allowing the market to clear, Hoover's administration compounded the crisis through disastrous interventions - hiking interest rates during a liquidity crunch, imposing Smoot-Hawley tariffs that strangled global trade, and strong-arming businesses into maintaining unsustainably high wages. The resulting deflationary spiral wasn't gold's fault but the direct consequence of central planning arrogance. The Bretton Woods system's collapse in 1971 followed the same pattern of political expediency overriding monetary integrity. The U.S. promised dollar convertibility at $35/oz gold but only to foreign governments while banning domestic ownership. When LBJ's simultaneous Vietnam War and Great Society spending spree drained U.S. gold reserves, Nixon simply severed the dollar's last tether to reality rather than confront fiscal discipline. The post-Bretton Woods era of pure fiat has created the illusion of stability while systematically eroding purchasing power - the dollar has lost 87% of its value since 1971, with the Fed responding to every crisis by printing trillions to bail out financial elites while main street struggles under crushing inflation. Weimar, the Depression, and Bretton Woods all share the same root cause: governments refusing to accept that money must be anchored to something beyond political whims. Gold doesn't cause collapses. It reveals them. Fiat doesn't prevent crises , it merely delays them while making the eventual reckoning worse. The historical record is clear: when governments treat money as a policy tool rather than a sacred trust, the result is always catastrophe dressed in different eras' clothing. Today's $35 trillion debt and monetary debasement suggest we've learned nothing from these lessons.
> One of the main themes of the book is the role played by the central bankers' insistence to adhere to the gold standard "even in the face of total catastrophe."[1] As Joe Nocera, a book reviewer at the New York Times, stated, "the central bankers were prisoners of the economic orthodoxy of their time: the powerful belief that sound monetary policy had to revolve around the gold standard...Again and again, this straitjacket caused the central bankers — especially Norman, gold’s most fervent advocate — to make moves, like raising interest rates, that would allow their countries to hold on to their dwindling gold supplies, even though the larger economy desperately needed help in the form of lower interest rates."
The argument that the gold standard was some kind of economic straitjacket that worsened the Great Depression is nothing more than elite gaslighting, a convenient myth peddled by central bankers and Keynesian apologists to justify their disastrous experiments with fiat money. The reality is that the gold standard didn't fail; governments and central banks did.
Take Britain's catastrophic return to gold in 1925. Churchill, egged on by Montagu Norman at the Bank of England, made the fatal error of pegging the pound at its pre-war parity, overvaluing it by 10-20%. This wasn't gold's fault, it was sheer political hubris. Had they adjusted the peg to reflect actual economic conditions, the ensuing deflationary spiral could have been avoided. Instead, British industry was crushed under the weight of an artificially strong currency, all so London's financial elites could cling to the illusion of imperial prestige.
Then there's France, whose central bank, rather than stabilizing the global monetary system, hoarded gold, which ended up sucking liquidity out of the world economy. And let's not forget the Federal Reserve, which in the early 1930s raised interest rates during a depression to defend gold reserves, turning a recession into a full-blown catastrophe. These weren't flaws of the gold standard, they were acts of economic malpractice by central bankers who either didn't understand the system or deliberately sabotaged it to serve creditor interests.
The classical gold standard, which had functioned smoothly for nearly two centuries before World War I, delivered price stability, facilitated global trade, and forced fiscal discipline on governments. It only broke down when politicians, eager to fund their wars and welfare schemes, suspended convertibility, then tried to haphazardly reinstate it in the 1920s without proper adjustments. The problem wasn't gold; it was the refusal of policymakers to play by the rules.
The truth is, central bankers like Norman didn't cling to the gold standard out of blind orthodoxy, they used it as cover for deflationary policies that protected the financial elite at the expense of workers and industry. The Bank of England sacrificed British manufacturing to maintain London's position as a financial hub. The Fed tightened money when it should have eased, deepening the Depression. The Banque de France hoarded gold, destabilizing the global system. These weren't "prisoners of economic dogma", they were architects of disaster, hiding behind gold to justify their incompetence.
And what did we get when we abandoned gold for the "flexibility" of fiat money? The stagflation of the 1970s, the financial crises of 2008, and the inflation surge of the 2020s, each one a direct result of central banks printing money with no anchor to reality. The Keynesian promise that we could spend and inflate our way to prosperity has been exposed as a lie. The gold standard didn't fail; governments failed the gold standard, and now we're paying the price.
The lesson of history is clear. Every time we discard monetary discipline, we get short-term euphoria followed by long-term collapse. The "gold standard caused the Depression" narrative is nothing more than a smokescreen, designed to absolve the real culprits, central planners and political elites, of their catastrophic mistakes. The bill always comes due, and this time, it's going to be paid in devalued dollars and economic ruin.
Further reading: "Did France Cause the Great Depression?
by Douglas A. Irwin"
As long as US Dollar supply was increasing at the rate of 2% per year (I don't know the exact rate but some predictable small rate) which is commensurate with Gold supply increase, everything was ok with the world, nobody cared whether it was USD or Gold. It is only when US started abusing this privilege that system started breaking.
The claim that the dollar system worked perfectly until the Fed got greedy is pure fantasy. The post-WWII Bretton Woods system wasn't a gold standard, it was a dollar hegemony masquerading as one, a rigged game where America played banker to the world while quietly running the printing press overtime. The U.S. promised dollars convertible to gold at $35 an ounce, but only for foreign governments, while internally, the Federal Reserve and Treasury operated with the restraint of a coked-up stockbroker. This was never sustainable. By 1971, the U.S. had a mere $24 billion in gold reserves backing $140 billion in foreign-held dollars, a laughable imbalance Nixon tried to conceal with capital controls and strong-arm diplomacy. But when France, under the leadership of then-President Georges Pompidou (a former Rothschild banker who, unlike today's economists, actually understood monetary games), started demanding physical gold in exchange for its dollar reserves, the gig was up. The London Gold Pool, a desperate central bank cartel formed in 1961 to artificially suppress gold's price, collapsed by 1968, precisely because the market smelled the rot.
The idea that the Fed "matched" gold supply growth with disciplined printing is historical revisionism at its worst. Throughout the 1950s, the Fed quietly monetized Treasury debt to bankroll Cold War spending. By the 1960s, it was cranking the dollar printer into overdrive to fund Vietnam and LBJ's Great Society fantasies, policies that sent inflation to 6% by 1969, even as the Fed kept interest rates below inflation (a.k.a. financial sabotage of savers). The so-called "2% rule" was fiction; the Fed was juicing the system for political convenience long before Nixon officially torched the gold window. And let's not forget the Fed's role in the speculative Eurodollar market, where offshore dollar lending exploded without reserve requirements, an early preview of the unregulated shadow banking systems that would later implode in 2008.
The fatal flaw was baked into the Bretton Woods design from day one, a paradox economist Robert Triffin warned about in 1960: To serve as the world's reserve currency, the U.S. had to supply dollars globally, but the more dollars it printed to meet demand, the shakier confidence in its gold backing became. This wasn't an accident; it was a structural time bomb. By the late 1960s, foreign central banks were drowning in dollars they couldn't redeem without triggering a run on Fort Knox. Meanwhile, the U.S. hollowed out its own industrial base, outsourcing manufacturing to Asia and Germany while replacing real production with financialization, Wall Street alchemy turning debt into "wealth."
Fast-forward to today, and the chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance. The dollar's purchasing power has cratered, 92% loss since 1971. The national debt has ballooned to $35 trillion, nearly triple U.S. GDP. Decades of negative real interest rates have turbocharged asset bubbles, turning housing into a speculative casino while wages stagnate. And now, thanks to Washington's rampant weaponization of dollar sanctions, the BRICS nations are actively dismantling the dollar's reserve status, with China stockpiling gold and brokering oil deals in yuan. The Fed's response? More printing, more deficits, more pretending the laws of monetary gravity don't apply.
The breakdown wasn't caused by "abuse" of the dollar system, it was the inevitable result of a system designed to be abused. Fiat currencies don't fail because people mismanage them; they fail because they enable mismanagement. Gold didn't collapse in 1971, the U.S. government simply abandoned it to avoid fiscal accountability. Now we're stuck with the consequences: a financialized husk of an economy where billionaires mint fortunes in leveraged speculation while workers get paid in depreciating digits.
I have question. If new value is produced in the system (say an iphone or google search), isn't it ok to produce more dollars to represent that value, which is also the reason why people didn't care for decades, because the system was working.
You're asking the right question but the answer isn't the Fed's money printer, it's the real economy's ability to back that money with actual productivity. Yes, an iPhone or Google search creates value but not all value is equal in monetary terms. The dollar's legitimacy hinges on scarcity and trust, not just raw economic output. If you could print money every time someone coded an app or assembled a gadget, Venezuela would be an economic superpower.
In a gold system you get rich by innovating, building, and trading. Not gaming financial systems. No Fed to bail out failed banks or corrupt hedge funds. Modern "hoarders" thrive because JP Morgan can lose billions, then get free Fed loans. Tech CEOs pump stock prices with buybacks, not R&D. Politicians borrow trillions, stick taxpayers with the bill. Under gold, these parasites starve. Gold forces all wealth to prove its worth in the free market.
The #1 driver of modern wealth inequality is fiat-fueled asset inflation. The rich own stocks, real estate, and hard assets, which soar as money is printed. The poor own cash and labor, which get crushed.
Hard money (gold) forces productive capitalism. Easy money (fiat) breeds crony oligarchy. The fear that gold leads to wealth hoarding is a myth. In reality, gold has built-in discipline mechanisms that punish idle capital and force productive use of wealth. The exact opposite of today's fiat-driven oligarchy.
Unlike fiat currency (which rots at 2-10% yearly inflation), gold appreciates in purchasing power over time as the economy grows (real deflation). Hoarding cash results in wealth growth, so saving is rewarded. But unproductive hoarding carries an opportunity cost because gold doesn't pay interest or dividends.
The wealthy can't just sit on mountains of gold. They must invest it to earn returns, fueling productive enterprise. In 19th-century Britain, capital flooded into railroads, factories, and infrastructure, not Wall Street derivatives.
Compare that to today's fiat hellscape where the rich park wealth in low-yield bonds, speculative bubbles, or offshore tax havens and central banks bail out hoarders (2008 bank rescues, 2020 PPP "loans" for billionaires).
Under fiat regimes, the politically connected get new money first (banks, corporations, government contractors) before inflation hits the working class. Gold eliminates this. No central bank can create gold out of thin air to enrich cronies. All wealth accumulation must come from actual production. No Fed-backed stock buybacks or real estate bubbles. No "passive income aristocracy" living off monetary inflation. Capital flows to useful ventures (factories, tech, agriculture), not unproductive asset-stripping.
Under gold, interest rates are set by real savings, not central planners. This means that reckless spending gets punished and long-term investing gets rewarded. If the rich hoard gold without investing, interest rates naturally rise (less gold available for loans), forcing them to deploy capital or lose out. Contrast this with yesterday's Fed-set near-zero rates, which allowed billionaires to borrow cheaply and speculate endlessly without real productivity. In the 1800s, Vanderbilt couldn't just borrow free money from the Fed to buy up railroads. He had to convince investors with real profits.
Unlike feudal systems (where land means power) or modern equities (where BlackRock/Vanguard dominate), gold's physical nature prevents monopoly hoarding. No "too big to fail" banks because gold can't be bailed out. No endless financialization because hard money kills derivatives casinos. And it's easily tradable because unlike real estate or fine art, gold circulates freely. The wealthy can't lock up the system. Gold moves to where it's most useful, not where it's politically protected. Bring back hard money. Watch the rentier class collapse.
I think Fed's money printers make all the entreprenuers chase value creation. It's like accelerated Red Queen Hypothesis. They are keeping everyone on their toes to gather as much of future new money as possible (that will be printed in future) at the same time creating value. My problem is if people just sit on the gold and not allow it to circulate and suffocate the economy because the gold hoarders would be rest assured that value will be eventually created in the system and their gold would appreciate and capture that value so they don't even try.
> They also only own 0.06% of US single-family housing stock.
This is one of those situations where averages hide the harm. Yes, when you look across everything it's not a big deal. But you can find clear instances where it is a problem, particularly in homes of certain value in growing markets (like Atlanta: https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/data-investors-now-own...).
This actually resonates a bit with my own thoughts from these comments.
If we assume a drug abuser is doomed for death in the next 6 months. But by using them as slave labor in terrible conditions for 3 years guarantees they will live to old age, regardless of any psychological trauma from said experience, is it worth it?
I'm not taking a position, I'm just making a thought experiment. It's more of a moral philosophical thing than an answer, I guess.
I think a lot of people not in the midwest may not understand the gravity of the fentanyl problem in the US. Literally every family is affected, whether directly or indirectly.
What makes it so that some people/cultures seem to value age over anything else? If their lives continue to be miserable, broken inside, violent temper thanks to being treated like a slave, a long life to me sounds more like a punishment than a goal.
It's basically a religious war. One side seems to think they need to "break people's spirit" by "work camps", the other side seems to believe in "healing from violence" by compassion. You're free to pick your side, but it's going to get harder to switch, and the other side will treat you as their enemy.
Your thought experiment, the drug dealer being universally doomed, the only consequence being a state of slavery for a finite time, etc has no relation to reality.
In my case, the company I work for isn’t a software company. The bean counters / IT group would rather just have something tacked onto their existing Microsoft subscription vs. something entirely different.
Also, I suspect part of the reason people are hesitant to use GCP because Google is perceived as a company that will gladly kill products off on a whim. Not great for something mission-critical.
The issue really lies in the fact that the (long-term, majority) shareholders aren't much, if at all, related to the customers or employees of the business, but first the founders, and then parties who are merely interested in rising stock prices and dividends. It feels like the solution here ought to somehow desegregate voting rights from how many shares are owned, instead of dismantling the concept of public ownership entirely. (Or, perhaps, allow the general public to proxy vote via their 401(k) index funds?)
(There's also strange situations like Google/Alphabet, which is publicly owned, but effectively does not allow shareholders to vote on anything.)
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