Re: working class?
Bill Bartlett wrote:
At 8:15 PM -0400 17/10/05, Doug Henwood wrote:
There’s always dictionary.com, which reports: “A person who lives on income from property or investments.”
Whereas of course a capitalist lives on income from capital.
Capital directly engaged in production, vs. capital separated from production by several degrees.
The distinction is meaningless, surely you can see that?
Uh, no.
Property income originates ultimately in production (where else could it come from? financial assets are instruments of distribution) but the rentier is performing a different social role from the capitalist.
I don’t know how to respond to that. It would appear from your earlier remark (to the effect that a capitalist who doesn’t work is a rentier) that you distinguish the two according to whether the individual voluntarily chooses to work or performs some useful occupation in society. So a capitalist would be more moral as measured against the Protestant Work Ethic than a rentier.
No. Just different, with different material interests. Just to pick one: a rentier is more concerned with keeping inflation down, while an industrial capitalist would prefer (if given a choice) a higher rate of growth. A rentier would prefer a high currency value, and a capitalist a lower one. But since these are intra-family quarrels, the differences are rarely profound.
I wrote a whole book on this, which you can download for free at http://www.wallstreethebook.com.
Doug