Aceyducey said:
Under the structure of our system someone has to own everything....
So if investors don't own the properties someone else will.
Well I would say the most likely event under alternative systems the properties would not have been developed or built. ie they would not exist.
Thus financial reserves are tied up regardless.
Or the social fund (human, financial) would be squandered on low value tasks.
Look, this discussion is about things that don't really exist. Money is a concept humans created to help us assign a relative value to parts of the universe around us. We choose to accept it as a reality as part of the game we play called economics.
Agreed, money is a human concept! It doesn't exist without humans. My understanding is that money was first used as a token to exchange for food. ie. money is exchanged for food. For example Edo times in Japan each regional lord had to pay a sum to the shogun, this sum was notionally a number of rice bushels, ie 120,000 per year, it was a tax/rent for the regional lord (and kept high enough to keep the lord from getting too much money and thus be able to raise the funds to buy arms and train armys). Anyway tokens where used to exchange a bushel of rice for other things and that token could be used to exchange back to rice, ie the basics of money.
Money is only limited because we choose it to be. That fits the rule of our game. We also assign values to resources based on what we think is their quantity, availability & cost of usage (plus a fudge factor for hope, greed & fear). In many cases these values are highly spurious and don't reflect the real limitations of these resources.
As in the aftermarth of the WWII, in Japan money became worthless, food was the only thing of true value. My wife's grandmonther tells the story of how she took 4 handwoven kimono's to the country (money was pointless) and exchanged it for about 3KG of potato's, a high quality handwoven silk Kimono these days sells about $10K, so that was $40K for 3KG of grubby. potatos'.
So money has no real value, the value is simply because society agrees that it can be used to exchange for goods/services/resources. If something overturns the applecart (ie losing a war), money quicky has no value and food (if it is limit) quickly becomes the item of true value to a hungry society.
Of course these days the food problem is not a big issue, most people in the developed world dont work on food production.
However I dont believe money is unlimited out of choice, money is limited because money is a token to trade for real goods/human services/resources, since these resources are by definition limited, money is limited. Innovation and focused effort, ie finding a ways to adding value to existing resources, building the better mousetrap, finding a quicker way to build a house, renovating a old house etc, creating something more valuable out of something less valuable, this is "creating money" as it as "created value".
At the end of the day the universe doesn't care how humans assign value for resources.
The resources exist in a certain quantity. That's the limiting factor, not the dollars we count them with.
I believe the limiting resource is the value we generate from the resources. Stupid example: we can use a limited resource sand (Silica) to make bricks, window glass or computer chips, same basic resource different value purpose. (yes I know the resources need to create a factory to change silica into a computer chip, vastly exceeds the actual silca resources that will be actually consumed in making computer chips).
It's not how many dollars there are that could be redirected into 'higher value' financial pursuits, it's how much space we have and how efficiently we use it - for housing, for recreation, for industry, for food production and for the other species on our planet (listed in the order we regard their importance)
Don't confuse the numbers with what is actually being counted.
So this is what I dont understand, lets say my company has a choice; should it spend a billion dollars building a golf course for it's executive employee's or should it spend it on developing a new software application that will deliver real improvements and produce greater efficiencies for those companies who buy and use the software? For example IBM in the late 50's early 60's spent $1B on developing the IBM system 390, with this system many companies were able to free up significant back office resources (clerks etc).
For the sake of argument lets say the building of a golf course or the creation of a new generation of business software consumes the same amount of resources (land to make the office or golf course; humans to write programs/plant the trees/landscape) and
cost the same amount of money, ie the resources used are the same. I would say that the limited resources are being used to generate 'higher value' activities in creating a new business software application over the reduction in golf handicap for the executives. From the investment in innovation to create the new software existing and future companies can redeploy existing resources (human, finanical) for other more important activies, ie companies become more effective/efficient. Thus from my point of view 'higher value' and your term of 'efficent use' of limited resources are more or less identical.
