User:RD/9k/dragon process (Q28,87)

Main entry

2887. rank good / worker-property (item which is artificially rare yet may be necessary in order to work; MDem 4.3) / treasure (object which has been assigned high value due to gap of labor between most people and it) / collector's item (object which is produced through labor yet treated as if it is somehow a naturally occurring rare item) / cost of living (object which has become expensive but is necessary in order to work or properly reside somewhere) -> I had such a hard time naming rank goods in the earlier versions because nobody tells you about this stuff. my terms and phrasings were all over the place from traditionally Marxist to non-Marxist to the moon. they're still a bit that way but they're getting better
2881. dragon process -> a hypothesized process of how objects gain monetary value. see Q28,88
      if you haven't figured it out by now, I want to reverse this thing.

Genesis

2888. All wealth comes from labor -> basically all goods which are sold are boxed up through labor. all real estate must be fenced in by some kind of labor. even gold must be mined in order to exist. final drafts of books are created from labor. book customer bases are created through a totally different kind of labor called marketing, which will determine the value of a book series in relation to how many books can be sold and for how much.
      labor is not an atomic thing, and has components. the owner of a gold or diamond mine can block off labor to increase the price of something, because effectively more labor stands between the person without the object and the object, and more effort correlates with more price. the more an object is blocked off by a labor wall the more it becomes a rank good, and people push to have it whether they truly want it or not just because it gives them an advantage in getting other things they do want. this does not make value "subjective", because there is still a particular mathematics that governs and limits the rate at which the price of rank goods goes up.
      this does not directly imply the statement that labor is "owned" or labor creates the "ownership" of wealth.
2886. There is a difference between utility goods and rank goods -> food is a utility good. gold is a rank good. university-level texts are often a rank good, but for some reason nobody wants to admit this. university-level texts are incentivized to never increase in supply beyond the very small selection of people who can actually understand them, or else they won't even sell. Liberal-republican economics assumes that ordinary-looking items like books won't transform into rank goods, and that any ordinary-looking item has incentives to be made more common, because this gives a justification for "competition" — the replication of as many bourgeoisie as possible under the rationale that some of them will provide the same product and thus bring the price down. but if you've ever heard the term "rare book" you'd know this isn't true at all. in practice university-level texts are like diamonds. they are very rare things produced with a lot of effort that nobody else has, and because few people can understand them they need some very rich or powerful people to buy them for capitalism to keep functioning normally. one option is for Elsevier to show up and pay money to "publish" academic journals so they will be peer reviewed and basically nobody will get to see them. one option is for a ring of academics who are all very powerful in terms of knowledge and the capacity to structure whole university departments to basically buy each other's books and go on and on about how bright they all are. the former has been standard in science, the latter has become increasingly popular in academic progressive theories. and you know, the funny thing, the terrible thing? rings of academics churning out books at tiny presses and selling them to each other might actually not be such a bad model, and might even be better for science in terms of getting ideas that already exist communicated to people more effectively. it does leave this little fringe of regular less-educated people being able to get the books sometimes if they look hard enough, and get into a field, instead of making the field totally inaccessible to people who haven't already plunged years into a degree. maybe it should be acceptable to go into science and sell a literature review so it can be a citation on Wikipedia and show up in bookstores. most people aren't going to discover new things that are successful, so why not just put all those people to work writing literature reviews and sorting through replication of experiments so experiments will then actually get replicated?
      what I would really like is if somebody did a literature review calling out all the Existentialist-Structuralist bullshit (pronounced redacted), but that's not going to be easy when all you have to prove it wrong is science and they're always going to spring the stupid "science is not for this" trap. which is tent of freedom poles. it's always that they take a bunch of bourgeois freedom poles and stake out a perimeter and put up a tent and they get very upset when everything doesn't operate on tent of freedom poles. even when it inevitably leads to separate parallel tents of freedom poles that want to annihilate them, and will destroy them. tent of freedom poles doesn't do anything to prevent anyone tearing down any of the freedom poles, it just leaves a ton of united people coming to tear down all the freedom poles at once.
2880. If money is infinite, why do we still have poverty? -> because money isn't infinite. that's my working answer. "wealth" and "money" are not even the same thing; the thing that gold was (wealth) didn't actually stop existing after the gold standard ceased to be practical, it just turned into the thing that money models rather than the thing money is. currency can be infinite but because it's a mathematical model of what happens underneath (the ratcheting and ratcheting up of product models to greater rarities through more and more total labor, enriching business territories while making things harder to get for all but a tiny ring of elite businesses), letting it get de-synced too far off society seems to be a bad idea. it seems historically that printing a lot of money and devaluing a currency breaks the fundamental purpose of money and that's actually why it's so harmful. it's not trivial for Keynes to get all the way to breaking a currency though, you have to really really create a whole lot of money until it stops correlating with anything.

Fantasy economies and Marx

2883. 2883Wealth gets rid of poverty / (9k) -> no. the limited nature of wealth creates wealth, so wealth doesn't even exist unless somebody doesn't have it. small capitalism relies on the lack of things for anybody to keep creating things. if creating wealth got rid of poverty we'd just all create a bit of stuff and then all capitalism everywhere would stop and we'd have an era of communism. ... it's more accurate to say creating wealth brings one person closer to life and a lot of people closer to death. ... that's how wealth works, and that's what it is. it isn't "hard work". it isn't stocks going up. it isn't one big stack of freedom you get after you have a lot of freedom and use it right. it isn't one big stack of race you earn after you get up and go to race all day — as much as that's oddly closer to true than a lot of Tory definitions. wealth is what brings temporary acceptance from others because you have out-survived them at something ... but could go away tomorrow the moment you aren't better than somebody else.
      I guess this goes on the surprisingly-long list of "Tory statements that could have come out of Stalin and horrified all Tories far more than when they said it themselves even though it means the same thing".
618. God created dragon hoards / Gold and silver are not tokens of rare and exclusive relationships, and are supernaturally or metaphysically valuable; this is not to state that any particular supernatural cause is the root of the metaphysical Ideal of wealth, but this is to state that the metaphysical Ideal of wealth is baked into physical objects like pearls and diamonds / To the monetary system, gold and silver ... were natural objects with strange social properties (Marx) [1] -> I think you see this proposition a lot in fantasy stories. hence the reference to fantasy creatures. the embarrassing thing is when you realize that real medieval people probably thought this (see: alchemists defining gold and its 'perfection' through metaphysical qualities) and even up to like 1600, really even today, people still think this on some level.
     gosh this proposition is even in Steven Universe isn't it? because the Gems have inherent ranks that are kind of metaphysical in nature, this stone always creates a Gem of this rank, even when you abolish the utter tyranny of the Gem planet in mysterious ways, they are still really defined by their inherent qualities qualitatively. the notion of value is like baked into them although because they are people it turns into more of a spatial hierarchy of desirable slots, this Careerist form where cartoon writers can be at the half-baked startup studio or the really good studio (don't tell me the writers aren't accidentally projecting their own production relations onto their writing, I just looked at a book of comic strips where the cartoonist was drawing a cartoonist, we know this happens). I'm sure there is a whole 9k page to be written about Gems and Darkners and how fiction projects the concept of exchange-value onto personified objects as something they inherently are or they socially constructed through historical events or customs in their own object society, etc. as well as even weirder questions like, if pets and object people are written similarly in fiction, are pets to be considered products when analyzing fiction and how pets are anthropomorphized?
618. Value is not inside diamond / Exchange-value is not inside diamond / No chemist has discovered exchange-value inside pearl or diamond (Marx) [2] / Economists like S. Bailey write that for people to have "riches" items must have value inside them related to exchange that becomes that wealth; this is not correct because exchange-value cannot be inside objects before they are exchanged, and if they are not being exchanged they must become "riches" by a separate use-value -> amazing. the suggestion that value is actually inside diamond is so funny when you put into perspective why it's not.

Ideology codes

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