Import old blog posts

content/post/pig-dog-02.md

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+title = "The Capitalist Pig-Dog Blog: Starting Points"
+date = "2015-04-24"
+tags = ["politics"]
+categories = ["pig-dog"]
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+
+#### 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](https://politicalcompass.org) 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_.
+
+Firstly, I don't consider myself to be an ideologue. I've read 
+[Das Kapital](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/) and
+[The Wealth of Nations](http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html),
+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.
+
+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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way)?
+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. 
+
+I think this mostly comes down to private property. Some people believe that
+property rights are [sacrosanct](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law),
+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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rentier_capitalism)
+[spectrum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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](http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/quarter-of-tory-mps-are-landlords-says-research/6524104.article)
+is that so [difficult](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) to achieve?
+
+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](http://gnucash.org) 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:
+
+![Net Worth](/post/pig-dog-02/net-worth.png)
+![Expenses](/post/pig-dog-02/expenses.png)
+
+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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom)
+but my net worth (excluding said pension, as it happens) is still
+[relatively low](http://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/9815/compare-your-net-wealth-to-the-rest-of-your-age-group/),
+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.
+