Those are all different things and different forms of borrowing though.
When someone borrows against cheese they are borrowing against existing personal property for which labor has already been supplied rather than borrowing against future earnings. The lender does not need to verify income and credit, just inspect the purity of the cheese. With a home loan, the owner is borrowing against the personal property in the building, as well as the common property in the land and the future earnings of other people such as their tenants.
Additionally in the case of a co-op, the interest charges the organization collects on the debt are usually reinvested locally for the benefit members.
No other species has the recorder of deeds \ title registrar \ court system to enforce claims over territory in absentia without the continual presence of the beneficiary. Even among humans most of Earth's territory is considered common property and not excludable or conveyable personal property when considering the ocean. Practically speaking something is only an asset in a financial context when ownership can be conveyed on paper and pledged as collateral for a loan.
Many animals use urine to "write" their claim to ownership. Trespassers get punished severely, and they know it. The message implies a high willingnes to enforce their claim, even at significant risk. Rivals usually stay away unless they are either desperate or confident that they are superior.
I would argue that these are the instincts that form the basis for our concept of ownership of assets, and predate our modern justice systems by tens of millions of years.
Yes, the level-headed take is that an organization has not taken a "hard-left turn" unless they are calling for redistributing the land and cancelling the debt.
Unless your baseline is "Nordic countries" or similar, the US is pretty far to the left.
This is true regardless of whether you look at the size of the government, relative to the economy or where it sits on the spectrum between ethno-nationalist vs self-criticism/openness to outsiders. The US has a much larger than average sized government spending vs the size of its economy and it takes in three times more immigrants per year than any other country.
By comparison, China, Japan, India and other major world powers are considerably further to the right. Even influential small countries such as Israel and Singapore are also a bit more conservative.
> Unless your baseline is "Nordic countries" or similar, the US is pretty far to the left.
How about most of Europe and Latin America?
It is hard to define what "left" means nowadays but it is telling that you believe the "size of the government", as defined by mostly military spending, can consist as a checkbox for being part of the left.
I am not arguing about the other governments you mentioned, I am arguing that it is simply incorrect to use "size of government" as a measure of how "left" a country is, particularly when using the US as an example. The US is notorious for having very bad safety nets while disproportionately investing in military, both of which are hardly causes favoured by the left.
Germany takes more and this is raw numbers not adjusted by the size of the country. Germany is less than a third the size of the US and taking more. Spain takes 60% as many immigrants as the US and is roughly 1/7 the population.
> Not sure where the claim about taking immigrants is coming from
The link was right at the bottom of the comment and if you click it, you'll see data sources mentioned prominently.
As of 2020, the US has 50.6 million foreign born immigrants, while Germany, which was #2, had 15.8 million. Adjusted for current population it's fairly close. The UK, in contrast had 9.4M, and Spain 6.8M. All of these countries have immigrant populations compared to world averages.
You could nitpick at time frames or various other ways to slice the data but there's no defensible claim that the US accepts fewer immigrants than most countries.
So it's amazing at miseducating and misinforming politicians in impoverished countries?
In industrial economies money is credit and countries issue their own money by setting up a banking system to lend it into existence on security of domestic tangible capital to promote wealth formation and create liquidity for domestic employers to make payroll. Since the early 1700s western governments have known how to create stable money from nothing without any gold, private banks, or external investors by lending it into existence through land loan office system.
It looks like El Salvador didn't create its own money before and was just using US Dollars sent back by emigrants though.
> It is not surprising that there are no historical documents outlining this, for it would likely pre-date even the written word by centuries or millennia.
Huh? During the 17th and 18th century European colonization of North America there was no existing standard of payment which all settlers had access to. Before the circulation of paper money by colonial assemblies, tax and wages for public servants shifted to tobacco due to the liquidity of the export market.
> There are many historical accounts of monies being displaced when new, superior forms of money enter into economies, which is an extension of Menger's thesis (Also known as Thiers' Law). If a society is using a form of money which for whatever reason becomes much less saleable, and a new commodity enters the market which is more saleable, the more saleable commodity will eventually displace the old money
In the American colonies, commodity money based on farm products was replaced by paper credit money loaned by governors on security of property. Gold and silver were skipped over as official forms of money because they were not in large supply, and because activists such as Benjamin Franklin argued that if people invested time in digging for Spanish gold and buried treasure they would be poorer than if they spent time plowing fields.
> for silver would remain the most saleable commodity for millennia until it would be later displaced by gold
What's important is not simply salability but liquidity. In industrial countries the value of credit money is secured by the value of the assets of borrowers, they have to collect money back in same unit of account after investing or spending it to avoid default and foreclosure. In America the colonies tobacco-money or farm-product money was displaced by paper money with no metallic backing. Metal-backed money was imposed by Great Britain.
In America during the late 1600s through early 1700s fiat currency was placed into circulation as the loan or mortgage held by the governor secured by the property of the borrower. There was no promise, advertisement, or intention to pay in metal. In a public land loan office system, the value of the currency is backed by the value of the property which the borrower does not wish to lose if they fail to collect back currency in the same unit of account after spending and investing to avoid default or foreclosure.
The promise which governors and colonial assemblies made to the borrowers was primarily that the government would continuously spend the revenues brought in by interest payments back into circulation on local infrastructure, and that new loans would be regularly issues at low interest rates of 3-4%, so that the money needed by borrowers to repay their debts was easy to come by, and that the debt would not be held or sold to private lenders engaged in usury.
So accepting the scheme was a good deal to borrowers, and provided immigrant farmers with cash & credit which would not otherwise be available to them without borrowing form European lenders at high rates. The government acted as a public bank and the money was a public utility.
Fiat currency wasn't invented in the US but most likely in China hundreds of years before the dates you cite (and let to hyperinflation almost right away).
> Historically, a number of cultures have attempted periods of paper currency, issued by the government and backed by nothing. Often it was the result of currency that was once backed (a gold standard or silver standard), but the government created too much of the paper due to war or other issues, and had to default on the metal backing by eliminating its ability to be converted back into the metal upon request.
In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the American colonial assemblies directly issued paper money to provide liquidity for farmers, so they did not have to barter with commodity crops such as tobacco. There was no prior government currency backed by gold, farmers paid tax in farm products.
> In that sense, currency devaluation becomes a form of tax and/or wealth confiscation. The public holds their savings in the paper currency, and then the rug is pulled out from under them.
There was no substantial devaluation or inflation of paper money in the colonies which emitted money using the public land-loan office system with no gold or commodity backing. In Pennsylvania the currency held most of its value for the 45 years the colony was permitted to issue it. It only declined 20% over its entire life time relative to the metal backed British Pound despite new currency continually being placed into circulation for immigrant farmers at low interest rates of 3-4%.
> Fiat currency is interesting, because unlike the history of commodity money, it’s a step down in terms of scarcity. Gold beat out all of the other commodity monies over centuries of globalization and technological development, and then gold itself was defeated by… pieces of paper?
In Poor Richard's Almanic, Benjamin Franklin explains the labor theory of value, and how if farmers spend their time digging holes to search for Spanish gold they will be poorer than if they had spent their time plowing their fields.
> Fiat money, if you like, is backed by men with guns.
When money is issued as credit, the value of the money is backed by the personal property and assets which the borrower stands to lose if they do not collect back money in the same unit of account after spending and investing it so that they can avoid a default or foreclosure.
> The answer is that it doesn’t have to, but it wants to. By issuing its own currency, it profits from seigniorage, which is the difference between the face value of the money and the cost to produce and distribute it.
In the land-loan office system, the government profits from interest. When it places new money in circulation by issuing credit to create liquidity it is acting as a public bank. The interest on loans which place new currency into circulation acted as a tax spent on infrastructure and public services, which was paid to the state rather than a private financial sector, which even Adam Smith admitted in the Wealth of Nations was sufficient to for most of the expenses of the state.
It's always surprising when American authors omit a discussion of American colonial money from a discussion of the history of money, given that American colonies were the first western governments to issue paper money and conduct extensive experiments on the subjects.
The fraction of average income paid to landlords is partially due to the concentration of land ownership and political culture of the ownership class.
Historically in 18th century rents were 1/3 of farm product in England, 1/2 of product in Milan, up to 3/4 product in China. Citizens in countries with low rents developed wealth quicker and in countries with high rents were quite poor.
>Paying 2x-4x for some piece of land is still waaaaaaaay cheaper for society than drowning in decades-long quagmire while infrastructure falls apart everywhere.
Eminent domain is not only used to acquire owner occupied homes for infrastructure. In some cities it is used to purchase poorly maintained properties from slumlords.
Landlords get what rent they can and don't invest anything in upgrades because they know they can cash out with the city government or public land bank. Promising to pay 2-4x may make the problem worse.
If a building is nearly fully depreciated, and has $0 building value, and the landlord invested closed to $0 in maintaining it, but the land is worth $200K, why should they get 4x whatever they claim the gamed comparables are and $800K from the public for doing nothing?
Maybe 150% of the building replacement cost for owner occupied homes makes sense, but ideally absentee investors holding depreciated properties and vacant lots wouldn't get paid a dime for the land value.
Because otherwise it'd be a case of the perfect being the enemy of the good? That scenario would happen anyhow even at market rate.
As a taxpayer I'd rather see some money wasted, and some progress being made, rather than nothing getting done ever.
Corruption and waste are tolerable to some degree, IMO. "Government wastefulness" is too often code for not letting the government do anything at all.
I just don't think our current societal bottlenecks are due to a budget or GDP crisis. There is so much wealth locked away, I'd rather it be spent on public works even if it means losing a few cents on the dollar to corruption along the way.
It's not like the private sector is risk free, or that the government doesn't waste money on wars and questionable foreign aid already.
There is such a backlog of infrastructure to build, whether roads and bridges or prisons and schools and climate change mitigation or renewables or nuclear... we gotta do something about that. If that means a slumlord getting rich, I guess it's a cost of doing business?
When someone borrows against cheese they are borrowing against existing personal property for which labor has already been supplied rather than borrowing against future earnings. The lender does not need to verify income and credit, just inspect the purity of the cheese. With a home loan, the owner is borrowing against the personal property in the building, as well as the common property in the land and the future earnings of other people such as their tenants.
Additionally in the case of a co-op, the interest charges the organization collects on the debt are usually reinvested locally for the benefit members.