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+---
+title: "The Capitalist Pig-Dog Blog: Starting Points"
+---
+
+## Beliefs and values
+
+My last post talked a bit about beliefs and sticking to them, but it shied away
+from discussing them in any detail. Words like "leftwing", and the
+Political Compass graph, might have given a few hints away. If I'm going to be
+analysing and changing my behaviour according to these things, it's important to
+get a decent grasp on what they _are_.
+
+=> https://politicalcompass.org Political Compass
+
+Firstly, I don't consider myself to be an ideologue. I've read Das Kapital and
+The Wealth of Nations, but I'm not about to pick one up and start brandishing it
+as the source of all answers to everything ever. Instead, I think of myself as a pragmatist - the economy (and human economic behaviour in general) is a means to
+an end, and should be arranged however best meets those ends, regardless of
+theoretical underpinnings.
+
+=> https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ Das Kapital
+=> http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html The Wealth of Nations
+
+What end(s) am I pursuing? I lack any great theoretical underpinnings for this
+either, but it's very important to me, personally, that everyone has access to
+a basic, comfortable standard of living. It is also very important to me that
+the power people have over other people is minimised. These beliefs do have
+a degree of tension, of course - to ensure everyone is comfortable, you must
+necessarily impinge on the freedom of others, to an extent. I've mostly resolved
+this internally by emphasising the collectivist strand over the individualist
+one.
+
+Is this all classic Third Wayism? Am I 20 years late to the party? Perhaps to an
+extent, but watching New Labour in action (or looking back at its goals and
+accomplishments) doesn't leave me with the feeling that the strategies pursued
+actually worked - instead, I'm left with some degree of hostility to naive market
+solutions.
+
+=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way Third Wayism
+
+I think this mostly comes down to private property. Some people believe that
+property rights are sacrosanct, with their exercise being a vital part of being
+free from others, but I lean more towards viewing them as a device for exercise
+power over other people. Property rights are, of course, here to stay - and I
+take advantage of them extensively - but this viewpoint informs how I'm inclined
+to use property rights to solve problems. In particular, I'm liable to avoid
+usages of property rights that permit a relatively few people to direct or control
+the behaviour of many others, or their exploitation. Like the entire economic
+spectrum.
+
+=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law Natural law
+=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism Rentier capitalism
+=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking Rent-seeking
+
+I consider rentiers to be rather bad; to me, this form of participation in a
+market necessarily maximises the amount of power over others that a group can
+have, while leaving significant numbers unable to participate (as artificially
+restricting supply to raise prices is the surest way of increasing profits).
+Austrian-style economics see rent-seeking and demand an end to all regulations;
+but in many cases, some regulation is actually quite handy. As an example, 
+removing all planning restrictions would reduce the costs of property
+significantly, but it would also result in some very unpleasant - including
+fatal - dwellings being constructed. Honest regulations aiming to meet the basic
+human need of housing - why is that so difficult to achieve?
+
+=> http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/quarter-of-tory-mps-are-landlords-says-research/6524104.article
+=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
+
+At some point I'll be examining what I do for housing myself, and what other
+options there are. Perhaps I'll be able to come to some conclusions at that point.
+For now, it's easy to point at problems, but much harder to think up solutions.
+
+## Income and expenditure
+
+I've spent a little while trying to work out whether I should publish actual
+numbers on here or not. We can be an odd bunch when it comes to how much we
+earn, what we spend it on, etc. In the end, I figured, what's the harm?
+
+I've been using Gnucash to track my finances since 2010, and while I could just
+open up read-only access to that database, even I'm not that open. So instead, I
+made some pretty pictures:
+
+=> http://gnucash.org
+
+=> /img/pig-dog-02/net-worth.png Net worth
+=> /img/pig-dog-02/expenses.png Expenses
+
+I am intending to dip into this historical data a fair bit in the future,
+so this isn't the sum total of everything I'm releasing ever; there might even
+be some tables in the future. The next post will look at my income in more
+detail, before I go on to poke  various aspects of expenditure (which is the
+really interesting bit). 
+
+For now, I'll just note that my take-home pay (after taxes and pension
+contribution) is ~£3300/month (this is better than the median) but my net worth
+(excluding said pension, as it happens) is still relatively low, although it's
+on a fairly rapid upward trajectory. All this gives me  significant leeway to
+change my behaviour that, I will try my best to remember, won't necessarily be
+available to people earning the kind of sums I can remember from before I lucked
+out (this job started in 2008; things were a lot hairier before then, hence the
+current net worth game). The next post will look at my income & net worth in a
+bit more detail; it's worth setting out how much I earn and why I earn it in the
+way that I do (along with considering alternatives, feasible or no) before going
+on to see how that money is spent, hoarded or invested in any detail.
+
+=> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom
+=> http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/9815/compare-your-net-wealth-to-the-rest-of-your-age-group/
+