“Noooooooooo…” Carmen whines helplessly. “Look, this is only indirectly my forte. My father is the one with a special interest in economics, and he raised me to respect the power of the field. He made me watch every episode of My Little Factory: Markets Are Magic when I was a kid. He made my brother and I bid on where we’d go on the weekends to clearly signal how much we wanted it, because money is the unit of caring. He devised a game in which I traded a stipend of imaginary currency for goods and services at home, and gradually increased the complexity until there were financial derivatives. So, even if this isn’t my special interest, I still feel comfortable saying this: If someone gave me a loan and a decade, I could own your island. Please: markets. That is all.”
[OOC: Both my parents are econ/finance people and ex-central bankers. The game about trading currency for household goods was an actual thing they did with me from seven to nine years old. I had a unique childhood.]
(from this glowfic)
i love my Economics Girlfriend (alison @sinesalvatorem)
This was my character’s reaction to being told by a noble woman that her country had a command economy, because using money for important services was undignified.
My character then turned that woman into a venture capitalist. #NoRegrets
It’s all fun and games until someone organizes the peasants into an anarcho-syndicalist commune.
Actually…
If the peasants’ lands don’t get forcibly seized by ex-aristocrats, anarcho-syndicalist communes are a very good thing for free markets.
First of all, they reduce the vertical nature of a feudal society by undermining the aristocrats’ power and distributing power horizontally, which in turn is useful for making markets adequately reflect people’s preferences and not just the aristocrats’.
Second, they allow the peasants to pool their capital for more intensive technologies of production and economies of scale, while having an incentive structure that supports value creation as people work for their own benefit instead of some asshole over there. Voluntary collectivization has often been favored over involuntary collectivization or tenant farming for a reason.
Third, the existence of a sufficient amount of anarcho-syndicalist communes effectively sets a reasonable floor for how horrible industrialization can be. Historically the inclosure acts and the poor laws and all that bullshit made the opportunities for the proletariat way lower than they would’ve otherwise been, thus rendering it artificially exploitable in the dark satanic mills. If peasants can anarcho-syndicalist-communize instead of working in horrible factories and mines, the factories and mines will be substantially less horrible or they will simply not exist on a free market.
Forth, land is fundamentally much more zero-sum than other forms of productive capital, and thus a lot of what aristocrats do is inevitably just unproductive rentseeking which anarcho-syndicalist communes would redistribute to the creators of value, disincentivizing unproductive activities such as aristocratizing and other forms of mooching off others’ labor. On the other hand, anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes can’t (unless they totally dominate society and ostracize everyone who wants to use currency and markets so thoroughly that social pressures prevent economic efficiency) destroy the markets’ ability to create value as they would still be incentivized to trade with outsiders where trade is beneficial.
1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 27 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from collapsedsquid and added:…strange women something something something distributin’ loans is no basis for a system of government!
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collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:I was more riffing on the “Venture Capitalist” thing, rather then the markets. And it all works very well apart from...
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sinesalvatorem reblogged this from ilzolende and added:This was my character’s reaction to being told by a noble woman that her country had a command economy, because using...
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