Comment by robertlagrant
13 hours ago
> I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.
Just responding to this as it seems the simplest: a capital-intensive business is something that will need millions of dollars over many years before it turns the first inkling of a product. Excluding this incredibly important type of business, and only thinking about tiny businesses when you're thinking of the phrase "capital-intensive business" is the problem.
You brought capital-intensive business into it and it's a fair example which needs more elaboration but now you're acting like that's the only example that matters.
There are plenty of businesses, not just "tiny" ones as you say, which can be built up gradually without large investments.
As for capital-intensive:
There are 2 currencies - money and human time. You can call them resourced but it's the same thing. What I object to is that two people can invest roughly the same amount of time into something and one can get several orders of magnitude more money out of it.
That goes directly against the party line that "everybody is equal".
Anyway, there is clearly a conversion rate between human time and money - hourly rate. So in a system where people own the product of their work according to the amount of work, we can factor invested capital as additional work performed by the investor and reward them accordingly.
We could use for example the median wage but it would be interesting to consider using the investor's past hourly wages (the more they got pair per hour, the less their investment would gain them now).