Category: Economics

In a new piece in Democracy Journal, Nick Hanauer and David Rolf argue that, in response to the rise of the sharing economy, we need to transition away from our employer-provided welfare benefit system to a more public system. Jeff Spross had a nearly identical (though considerably shorter) argument in The Week earlier this month. While I obviously am a… Continue reading The Social Democratic Sharing Economy

Over at the Demos dot org slash blog, I discussed this Bernie Sanders quote: If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn’t matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn’t matter if people… Continue reading Does brand differentiation lower prices?

Two posts ago, I rehashed the point that owners of capital income do not produce it and therefore have no desert-based claim to it. One post ago, I responded to the rebuttal that they do in fact do work to receive capital income, namely the work of deploying and managing capital. In that post, I… Continue reading Wages of Abstinence and Risk

In my prior post, I pointed out that capital income is paid to non-productive people who don’t, under a labor-desert theory of entitlement, deserve it. In response to this explanation, some commenters have said that in fact capitalists do work in some way. It’s not that they just have capital and then income flows to… Continue reading “Have I Myself Not Worked?”

It bothers me as a general matter that so much of our discourse about the economy can proceed as if capitalism distributes things according to variations in work and contribution, or in short desert. It bothers me both because it is wrong and also because it is clearly wrong in ways that have been known… Continue reading Vampire Capital