MD, simple question:

I will give you $5 today. Or I'll give you $6 in 10 years. Which do you prefer? Assume 0 inflation.

Another example:

I give you $100 today. Or I'll give you $101 in 50 years. Which do you prefer?

Final question:

I give you $100 today. Or I'll give you $500 in 1 year. Which do you prefer?

Here's your counter example, I'll take $5 on TomCollins FT account:

I have a good idea for a business. It will cost me $100 to get a license to run the business. I expect to make $50,000 a year from my business (my current salary is $30,000). A bank loans me a money for $100. I have to pay it back $120 in a year's time.

In year 0, the bank has $X, I have $0. Assume I spend $30,000 a year and there are no taxes.
After 1 year, the bank has $X + 20. I have $20,000.

Wealth concentration has gone away from the bank and toward me, even though there was ursury.

Let me generalize, and make up for some of my spelling errors above. Consider a world with three atomic families, and a billion family tribe...

All these families earn about (W) in wages throught their good, honest, and hard work. They all live in modest but very nice homes. Homes worth about (H) with taxes, maintenance, and overhead costs of about (T) . They all 'own' about (C) worth of modest cars, extravagant big screens, and/or other trash. They all live the same modest lifestyles, spending about (W-R-T) for expenses and entertainment. The Lords 'own' two homes, one of which they rent to the Bastards for (R+T) while the Freemen are home 'owners'. Let G(y) represent the difference in world wealth relative to year zero.

Year....... Lords.......... Freemen..... Bastards..... Tribe
---------------------------------------------------------------
Year 0:.. 2H+C........... H+C........ C... 1000000000 (H+C)
Year 1:.. 2R+2H+C...... R+H+C..... C... G(1)-3R+1000000000 (H+C)
Year 2:.. 4R+2H+C...... 2R+H+C... C... G(2)-6R+1000000000 (H+C)
Year X:.. 2RX+2H+C.... RX+H+C... C... G(X)-3RX+1000000000 (H+C)

There is no positve value for G(y) such that the Bastards are not deconcentrated. These transfer payments, like rent, will always cause wealth to concentrate. This is true regardless of any increase in overall wealth. Truly dude, none of that stuff makes any difference. If you would take the time to spread sheet a simple doodle like I did ITT twice now, it would become obvious.

If you are comparing a particular quanity of wealth to the total quantity of wealth, in other words "concentration", you need to compare these two quantities at some point. If you are forgetting one of them, and you did completely in all your examples, how can your answer even begin to make any sense?

Where does poop go? Where does the dog poop disappear to?

MD,

Why is your arbitrary pointless example any better than mine? You are assuming everyone is spending the same amount of money. Why is that assumption needed? Why wouldn't the richer folks spend more? Or the poorer folks spend less?

If you need a table, I can do that.

Wealth	Lender	Borrower
Year 0	100	0
Year 1	120	18800

Lender has $100 at the beginning. He lends it to Borrower for 1 year, who pays him back $120. Lender spends $30,000 and earns $30,000 in wages. Somehow the borrower overcomes ursury and the consolidation of wealth.

Borrower earns $50,000 due to the $100 loan to buy a barbershop license. He was making $30,000 a year in year -1, and kept his spending the same. He ends up with a greater concentration of wealth, even though he was borrowing money and paying huge interest.

Rich folk decide to spend their wealth after it has concentrated. The fact that they spend more and still have more wealth left over would be proof that capitalism does indeed concentrate wealth. And it is.

The purpose here to demonstrate mathematically the capitalism concentrates wealth. To do that we need to control for things that have nothing to do with capitalism, like working hours and shopping patterns. If you were trying to demonstrate that Communism concentrates wealth in the Party Elite (which it does), and I kept saying... what if the Party elite spend more? Maybe they have mistresses? Blah, blah... would that have anything to do with Communism?

You are assuming you and Lender are the only two people in the world, and that wealth appears by magic.

They spent it all on ice cream. There's a lot of ice cream in the world, it takes a lot of money to corner the market. Plus the damn proles keep making more.

i reckon his point is just that, he is oversimplying an extremely complex issue to make a point. that's not to say that capitalism does not concentrates wealth, which with some reasonable assumptions there is good reasons to think. there is also good reasons to think that economy is not a zero-sum game, that a free society does not equal egalitarianism and a host of other things.

the largest reason for why anarcho-capitalists are sceptic towards anarcho-syndicalists isn't because we have differing views on what const. a coercive relationship or not. its because we have differing views on what the acceptable methods of figthing coercive interhuman relationships are.

The wealth doesn't appear by magic, and there are more than 2 people in the world. Just assume they spend all their money equal to what they earn. There is more wealth in the world because the barber now is able to provide more value to people by being a barber instead of a construction worker.

Also, your proofs are not even close to proofs. But if you could produce proofs that were logically correct, you wouldn't be digging ditches.

Now that was funny! Well played pvn, well played. I wasn't speaking our contemporary capitalistic societies with all their dysfunctions. Of course bank failures, charity, stock crashes, bailouts, suppression of zones of autonomy, dying in debt, theft, lotteries, war, welfare, revolutions, the insanity and chaos caused by texting, cocaine addiction, Scientology, or any other externalities which will necessarily cause wealth to be distributed in other, non-capitalistic, ways. Of course there is no way you or me or anyone can "prove" that all this stuff will concentrate, go egalitarian, or just implode.

What I can demonstrate is that any form of Usury will concentrate wealth. In fact, that is what the definition of usury is, if you think about it. Systems of usury set up a gravity like sucking from small wealth to larger wealth. The upper class will suck wealth out of the middle and lower classes. In the middle there is an equilibrium point where the wealth being sucked out by the upper class equals the wealth being sucked in from the lower class. And the lower class gets sucked by everyone (but not in a good way).

I will repeat again, this fact remains true regardless of whether the economy is static or not. The growth or the contraction of the economy has no cause or effect relationship with the concentrating effects of usury. They are independent variables.

A second repeat again: You are confusing anarchists with Communists. Anarchists are not egalitarians. That is not our goal. Our goal is eliminating hierarchical and coercive relationships. I also suggest you might be making a false dichotomy: =EITHER= capitalism =OR= egalitarianism.

And a third repeat: This feature of usury is not unique to capitalism. Communism and monarchy are also based on usury. Both the "right" (capitalism), the "left" (Communism), and the Ancient Regime (monarchism) are all based on usury. Anarchism is in opposition to usury, from the "right", from the "left", and from the Rights of Kings equally. No, 100% no. ACists and anarchists have completely different opinions on what a coercive relationship is. For example, the wage system. That's what we were chatting about before we had a 200 post ice cream derail about nothing that we all ended up agreeing is a fallacy. Anyone want to chat about why anarchists consider the wage system coercive? Dude, I got a math degree from the University of California. Believe me, they don't give those out to people who can't do proofs. I dig ditches, among other things, for work. And I live about the same lifestyle of any barber I know. What makes you think people that work with their hands are stupid?

No, you can't.

That's kind of sad. Which one? I just refuse to believe Berkeley, which is what most people mean when they just say "California"...

I still don't think "concentrate wealth" has been defined very rigorously.

MissileDog,

How come I don't have $5 in my full tilt account?

That would concentrate wealth, LDO.

Good point pvn! See what pvn said above TomCollins, LOL. Well played coffee_monster, well played!

I was talking about that sucking feature Usury has. Let's say a Lizard Man took his spaceship to earth, blew a puny human for $20, deposited it into a 1% low risk wealth indexed and denominated managed investment, and then flew back to the Lizard Planet. But before he left, the Lizard Man reminded the Illuminati what happened the last time a puny human defaulted on the Lizard Men. That Noah flood thingee. What would happen?

That $1 wealth will keep sucking the 'ownership' away from the puny Humans, and it will never stop until the puny humans default. Lizard Men are immortal, it ain't no thing for them to be patient. And unless the puny humans can infinitely increase the wealth 'owned' by the Lizard Man, they will have to sooner or later default. And then the Lizard Men will send the waters to wash the human foolishness of Usury away...

If the earthlings take his $20 loan and invest it to create more wealth than the 1% interest, they are better off (and so is lizardman) than they were before, but the earthlings end up with a greater percentage of wealth than before. The humans buy him off for his $22 or whatever, and the loan is dead, no default. GG Lizardman.

facepalm.jpg what if, what if, what if... let's say, the Lizard Man invests through a blind trust. Do indexed investment funds really investigate their customers to see if they are Lizard Men? If the Lizard Man is willing to take below market rates, and nobody knew he was a Lizard Man, why wouldn't he have his choice of a whole ton of funds...

And that is not the point, of course... but I think you know that.

I honestly want to know what drugs you are on. It's like a whole different level of consciousness and I'd love to ride that train.

Can you please give me a reason why my example was insufficient for the $5 reward?

so what if..what if...what if... is a good refutation to pvn's or Tom Collins' arguments, but not to your own? Because that's all your 'examples' are, just a series of what ifs.

The strange thing though, is that your claim that usury always concentrates wealth is not proven by your 'what ifs', but the opposite argument (that usury doesn't always concentrate wealth) can be proven by 'what ifs'.

Counter examples were my favorite kinds of math proofs.

All this lizard man talk reminded me of this video:

Alien refutes "anarcho"-capitalism & agorism

So in missiledogville money is the only form wealth can take?

BTW, all this tap dancing is really fun to watch. I mean if we're all honest here we know that:

1) Wealth will concentrate under any form of capitalism given that "wealth concentration is a fact of life in any system based upon hierarchy and private property."

2) Wealth concentration leads to tyranny.

3) Therefore, any form of capitalism will lead to tyranny.

Now for anarchists this exercise in logic is all academic. What grinds our gears the most is not the common sense truism that capitalism leads to tyranny, but rather the fact that capitalism IS tyranny! Hence our concern with firing the boss and thus moving away from the industrial feudalism ACists favor (the many order-takers working for the few order givers) towards the industrial democracy anarchists favor (the many working for themselves in free association, i.e. no more taking orders from above, iow no more masters).

Anyways, back to the wealth concentration deal. I guess I'm basically left to conclude that either ACists are extremely dumb/brainwashed and somehow don't know that wealth concentrates under capitalism OR ACists are actually very sophisticated and understand for tactical reasons that they must skirt around this troubling reality as much as possible given that honest acknowledgment of such reality would totally nuke their whole propertarian cult. After all, "anarchists" that favor a socioeconomic system that leads to tyranny isn't a very catchy philosophy. Probably the only way to patch that up would be to take the Orwellian route and redefine tyranny as freedom. Perhaps using some kind of ultimately specious justification but still clever enough to at least trick upper/middle class white men (a demographic that's fortunately pretty easy to trick). Maybe something along the lines of this clever reasoning: "working for a private dictatorship IS freedom because people "freely" consented to it. The fact that they'd rather submit to a dictator than starve to death/face dire poverty PROVES that!!!"

No, we don't know this. It's just been begged this whole time. When I pointed that out, Missiledog agreed and then laughed it off.

You want me to prove that usury is usurious? What the hell do you want to here? I have an empty extra house, I have it managed as a rental for a awhile, I subtract taxes, supplies and wages for the maintainer, management fees, and what do I got... I got the same exact house that I used to have, and and a whole bunch of extra cash. Did I do any work? NO. Did my wealth just concentrate? YES. What the hell are you guyz even talking about? Are you saying It stayed the same or deconcentrated?

And if my wealth is concentrating, where does it come from? Well it comes from someone somewhere working the fields or working the machines. There is absolutely nowhere else for it to come from, correct? So somewhere someone is working and being robbed at the point of production. And none of this has the slightest thing to do whether the overall economy is expanding or contracting.

WTF are you even asking about? Do you want me to "prove" that 105% of 100 is 105?

If I rent a house from someone, and use what I would have used to buy a house to invest in my business, and it doubles in value, which way has it concentrated?