• unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Owning is not supplying. Owning is holding. Supplying is transferring possession to another party. When you hold ownership of a business, you maintain control of the business, as it operates, and you collect profit from its operation. You never deplete the supply of the business you own as a natural consequence of its operation.

    Capital is assets that have productive value, such as businesses or rented properties. Cars and homes that are used by their owners are not capital, and neither is cash deposited in a bank. Most capital is owned by a very small cohort of society.

    Business owners own capital. Workers own essentially none.

    You have very deep confusion about extremely basic concepts, a condition that is not being helped by your snarkiness and hostility

      • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ok. Capital is just cars and cash.

        The article you referenced explains (emphasis added)…

        While money itself may be construed as capital, capital is more often associated with cash that is being put to work for productive or investment purposes.

        I think my time is better spent now supplying my capital to a local drinking establishment.

        Enjoy ranting.

          • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The act of investment is purchasing (or exchanging) capital using cash or other assets.

            A business may acquire funding from investment, but in such a case the investor is trading cash for equity, bonds, or some other investment asset representing the present or future value of the company, or generated by the company. The investor is not supplying capital, but rather purchasing capital (or trading capital).

            The idea that the investor is supplying capital to the company is only a metaphor.

            Someone may lose money from an investment, but most capital is owned by immensely wealthy individuals, whose situation is vastly removed from that of ordinary workers, who actually do face the risk of losing their only home or their only car.

            Even small businesses are owned by individuals who have chosen to become business owners in order to profit from others’ work. Any risk they assume is through an attempt to enrich themselves from gains not shared with workers. By not sharing their gains with those who are working to create them, business owners, large or small, are not helping workers, but rather preventing workers from advancing.

              • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                If you chose to use your house as collateral in order for the opportunity to enrich yourself, then no one owes you any gratitude. You are not a hero. You acted in your own interests, not for helping others.

                If workers provided labor, and you only paid them wages, then you profited from their labor, and prevented them from advancing by realizing the full value of their labor.

                The only reason your house was at risk was because the bank hoards capital, using lending as a device to augment its own wealth.

                If capital were shared by everyone, then all the problems you describe would not occur. No one would lose houses or cars, no one would be a tens of millions of times richer than anyone else, and everyone would be paid fully for their labor, without distinction of owner versus worker.

                  • unfreeradical@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    You are not understanding.

                    The risk is artificial.

                    Those who have the most wealth, the most capital, are not facing risk, compared to everyone else. Someone who has $10 billion in assets and loses $2 billions has not lost in the same way as a poor person who loses a car. The billionaire is completely insulated from the precarity faced by most of the population, because the billionaire privately controls the vast wealth of society. The losses suffered by the billionaire owe to the instability of the business and the business cycle, not to the trials of life.

                    Those who are most wealthy face the least risk, and in fact impose the genuine risk on everyone else.

                    If control over capital were shared, then no one would be precarious, nor need to use a home as collateral for a loan.