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