Subject:
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Re: Swapping money for time (was Re: Lego Maniac's Webring and Yahoo)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Tue, 19 Sep 2000 02:37:13 GMT
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Viewed:
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248 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Kevin Wilson writes:
> James Brown wrote:
> > can invest time to get money (with varying efficiency), but have yet to • find a
> > way to invest money and get time. :)
>
> Every time you pay someone else to do something you could do yourself,
> you invest money to get time. Cleaning services, diaper servies, oil
> change services... I'd class all of those that way.
Indeed. And one of the basic tenets of capitalism is that while it's not
possible to make goods appear out of thin air, it IS possible to make wealth
seemingly appear from nothing, in that every time someone invents a new more
efficient way to do things he has just increased the wealth of the system by
however much time it saves, as we now can use that time for other things.
When Bill Gates says MS has created wealth, that's what he means. And they
have (to the extent that we actually save time after subtracting blue screen
of death incidents <grin>).
Now it's not really that wealth came from NOTHING because the invisible part
is the effort expended by the inventor to be trained and to experiment, etc.
But Marx was wrong. Wealth isn't created by labour itself (nor is it usuallly
created by capital sloshing around in currency futures markets either, for
that matter). Wealth is created by innovation, but realization of it requires
capital and labour as well.
++Lar
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