Rent Seeking and Productive Power
Metadata
Highlights
- Interest is a form of rent seeking. Rent seeking saps the vitality of a nation by destroying incentives to economic production and innovation, as well as leading to a spiralling of wealth upstream to the rich (who can afford to make these loans in the first place).
- It is inherently parasitic as it draws wealth upwards to the people with the spare capital to be loaning in the first place. It further saps the productive power of a nation over time as more money goes into paying interest than being invested into productive ventures.
- One could argue that over the past fourty years we have ignored wealth creation for cheap credit lent at interest to finance petty consumption, resulting in our society becoming the largest multilayer rent seeking scheme in history.
- All expenditure in the instruction of youth, the promotion of justice, defence of nations, &c. is a consumption of present values for the behoof of the productive powers. The greatest portion of the consumption of a nation is used for the education of the future generation, for promotion and nourishment of the future national productive powers.
- Cultivating the productive powers of yourself, your family or your nation is the road to prosperity, and this primordial logic has been forgotten in our time.
- The logic of the Khaldunian curve is to achieve the optimal amount of tax revenues while not inhibiting economic productivity in any way. The point is not about economic consumption: we do not want more wealth in society just so it may be spent on consumption, we want people to put that wealth into innovation and into productive sectors which make returns for the next few generations at minimum.
- The successful economies of the 21st century will not look to Smith or Marx; it will be Ibn Khaldun, List and others who expounded upon the importance of long-term investment and an active involvement of the state in this.