this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Investing your money is not “making money for free” it’s providing your money to someone else so they can use it to make money. Then you make money when they make money. It’s capitalization. You risk losing all of that money if the investment fails. If you work a job you put your time and effort in and get paid for that but if the company fails you lose your job, they don’t take away your house.
It’s no different from a loan. Suppose you lend your friend $10 to buy some pepper seeds and they grow a bunch of peppers, sell some of them for $20, keep the other peppers, and collect seeds from the peppers so that they have even more seeds next year. Is it really fair if they just pay you back $10 next year? No!
They used your $10 to buy the seeds they needed to start with, they earned themselves $20 from pepper sales, plus they got to eat some peppers and even ended up with more seeds than they originally bought. They should pay you back more than $10 for the simple reason that you did not have use of your $10 for an entire year, so you did not have the ability to buy those pepper seeds and make the profit yourself.
That’s the time value of money. It’s why we pay interest on loans. Because to not do so is to saddle the lender with unfair opportunity costs, in addition to the risk of losing their money (maybe the peppers all die and your friend tells you they can’t pay you back the $10 anymore).
You're also missing the point. In your scenario, someone else did the work and the person with the money got more money as a result. This is what we mean when we say you can't earn a billion dollars - you're just skimming off other people's work
If you don’t think it’s fair then don’t borrow my $10 for pepper seeds! Find something else to do to earn your own money. I’ll buy the pepper seeds myself and keep the profits.
By the way, I’ve grown peppers myself. It’s very easy. The sun and the plants do 99% of the work. Claiming that “you did all the work” by germinating and transplanting a few seeds is quite silly.
Nobody said it wasn't fair. But that's not working for money. That's explicitly the point of investing.
If you grow your own peppers, yeah you'd be working for the money. It doesn't get much clearer than that. Digging up nonsense about how 'hard' the work is in your random example is irrelevant and wildly out of touch.
Let me quote GP because it seems like you’ve already forgotten what they said:
Now how do you reconcile that with this:
Either you’re just flat out lying when you say this, or you think “skimming off other people’s work” is fair. Which is it?
It's not a charitable way to phrase it, but it's not inaccurate. 'Fair' is wildly subjective. The concept itself is not unfair, but the application certainly can be. Regardless of whether it's 'fair' or not, the general point is that it isn't work.
Sure. I mean you can buy a solar panel and put it on your roof and then sell the electricity it produces back to the grid. That’s not work. Is it fair? I don’t know. There are definitely people who think subsidies for solar panels are unfair.
There’s also the question of whether or not you earned the money. I think if you take a risk with your money and you invest it wisely then you’ve earned the profits you made on (minus taxes of course).
Obviously if you inherit millions of dollars from your parents you didn’t earn that. We as a society begrudgingly put up with inheritance because we admit that as humans our urge to provide for our children is a powerful instinct.
There’s also a question of whether or not an investment benefits society. I think the pepper growing and solar panel examples show clear benefits to society. With larger companies the question is a lot more complicated.
For example, I used to think Apple benefited society with all the work they put into their computers and growing the personal computer market. Now I think they’ve moved away from that towards rent-seeking. So to me it wasn’t the money that made the difference, it was the behaviour.
I don’t know what you do for a living, but that’s the clearest and most engaging explanation of interest rationale I’ve ever heard. You’d be a great teacher.
I'm betting he is a landlord, perhaps a banker, some bootlicker professon for sure.
No I’m betting teacher, trainer or something aligned where they have to invent relatable analogies. That was top tier. I’d like to hear them explain the banking system, how money is invented from thin air by a mortgage, for example. Someone once explained it to me but it’s gone in the mists of time.
Edit: Also I don’t get the hate. Am not picking up ultra-capitalist screw the worker vibes. Maybe tone it down so people can just be themselves and chat?
I’m not a teacher but I do volunteer to tutor high school kids whose families are from Somalia. I used to be in the mathematics teaching program in university but I decided not to become a teacher. I love to teach but I’m not equipped to deal with all of the other stuff teachers have to put up with (angry parents, disinterested / defiant students, standardized testing, failing school systems).
Don’t let the people throwing around “bootlicker” bother you. These folks are totally lost in a pit of resentment. They’re basically left wing MAGA types. The two groups are going to tear apart western civilization if they have their way. I’m hoping sanity will one day prevail.
You're going to be a great bootlicker one day too. Dumb as a rock, can't remember simple concepts, sycophant extraordinaire.
lol ok. Have a nice day.