Investment is stealing

It annoys me so much when people talk about "making your money work for you!". I keep seeing it, encouraging you to invest. It's a full metaphor, not just something people say. They usually start talking about how your money is thousands of little employees who will tirelessly work for you so you don't need to. But money can't work, money is supposed to be an abstraction of labour value. It can't produce itself.


I've been trying to look up more about what investment actually IS, and the information is actually really hard to find. So I may have a few things backwards, but my point is fairly self explanatory I think. Money is an abstraction of labour. It's only supposed to exist when someone works for it. Thus,  getting money for nothing is a way of stealing someone's labour value. This could be by underpaying those at the bottom, or more indirectly like printing money and driving up inflation- undermining EVERYONE'S labour.



When you look for information about investing a lot of what you'll see is just this kind of stuff:


"It's actually pretty simple: investing means putting your money to work for you. Essentially, it's a different way to think about how to make money. Growing up, most of us were taught that you can earn an income only by getting a job and working. And that's exactly what most of us do. There's one big problem with this: if you want more money, you have to work more hours. However, there is a limit to how many hours a day we can work, not to mention the fact that having a bunch of money is no fun if we don't have the leisure time to enjoy it

You can't create a duplicate of yourself to increase your working time, so instead, you need to send an extension of yourself - your money - to work. That way, while you are putting in hours for your employer, or even mowing your lawn, sleeping, reading the paper or socializing with friends, you can also be earning money elsewhere. Quite simply, making your money work for you maximizes your earning potential whether or not you receive a raise, decide to work overtime or look for a higher-paying job." - Investopedia


Practically, that tells you nothing. It implies that the money is coming out of thin air and doesn't say a thing about the processes. I think most people just leave it at that and head off to learn how to use those magic stock numbers to get rich. But even if you don't see it, someone is getting hurt. I understand venture capital is sometimes needed to get things off the ground, but with new crowdsourcing capital generators like Kickstarter, that's not such a problem. And most people just buy off the TSX or something. Besides, fucked up corporate law requires companies to make every attempt to maximize profit for shareholders, which is horrible and stupid. Yay mindless pursuit of growth! Supporting that kind of system would suck even without the rest.


In the end however, it's a powerful income source that everyone has access to. I'm not sure how I feel about lower class people taking advantage of it. In the end, it's their (pshh, talking like I'm not a minimum wage worker) money that's being siphoned off by this system. They have a right to it, but it seems they shouldn't support it. And yet, maybe it would force corporations to behave if more lower class people were shareholders? Banks go and invest your money anyway, and give you a pitiful cut of the proceeds. I guess you should invest if you're lower class? But mostly everyone feels like they're poor, and push themselves into debt with stupidly extravagant purchases. The middle and upper middle class will only cement this system by jumping in,and I'm not sure where the cut off should be. Damn that's annoying. I'm tempted to just keep everything in cash on principle, but I have a feeling that would end badly and accomplish little.



I didn't realize this at first, but this entire post is reminiscent of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon quote I first encountered in high school and struggled for so long to understand- "property is theft". I should really go read his book.


I'll probably edit this at some point to make it more readable.