Yes, this is really so important to understand. This belief that consumption is important fuels all these ridiculous programs, like “tourism vouchers” in Poland for the people to spend on vacation in order to rescue the tourism business. Or keeping interest rates low and mortgage cheap in order to guarantee that everybody can buy a home.
That’s an interesting point that I somehow missed before. But I’m not entirely convinced. If you stay away from certain stocks, it will have a negative effect on their price, so it’s bad for all the shareholders. If the price is too low, the company will also not be able to raise more capital through issue of more shares. But yeah, if a company, some oil or tobacco corporation, is not missing capital, they can even buy back their own cheap shares and if there is still demand for their products, their will make great returns.
Yeah, you can act either as a customer (don’t buy that stuff, give bad reviews) or as a business. A good example can be (again) Tesla, which rivalled the whole auto industry and fossil fuel industry with its solar panels and electric cars.
To answer the question if our mustachian community might be the parasites of society, I recently made the effort to look at the tax paid by three types of people: normal, frugalists and eco-askets. Unsurprisingly, normal people (working fulltime for 45 years and saving little) pay the most income tax. All types consume and pay VAT, but with less consumerism there is less VAT for the government, so the frugalists (Working fulltime for 20 years and saving hard) and eco-askets (working 50% and saving nothing) pay again less. What’s important: they all pay between 9 and 19 annual salaries in tax over their lifetime. Hardly parasitic behavior. Even less so in Switzerland, where the government does not offer free health care and free child care. All of which has to be paid separately.
What society finds difficult to deal with are able-bodied people who work less than 100%, switch voluntarily to lower paying jobs or stay home after having graduated as doctors, engineers and airline pilots (expensive educations paid for with tax money, at least in Switzerland). You will still find plenty of couples without kids, where a spouse stays home not doing anything in particular. Society find this much more acceptable than FIRE guys geo-arbitraging and tax-optimizing their way through life. At least the couple still pays for their own expenses unlike recipients of social welfare, long-term unemployed and a few individuals who are cheating the system. These might be the parasites relying on others to sustain themselves.
For those who are interested in this thread, Pwc and the WWF have edited a report on sustainable finance: Leading the way to a green and resilient economy | PwC
In June 2020, the Federal Council itself has apparently decided to make it an objective that Switzerland becomes a leader in sustainable finance.
“Swiss financial flows are currently contributing to global warming to the tune of 4 to 6 degrees Celsius. Oil drilling, fracking and pipeline projects: Swiss financial institutions continue to fund, invest in and provide insurance for far too many activities that harm the climate and nature. By redirecting the money into sustainable activities, they can play an active role in shaping an economy that preserves the basis of our existence rather than threatens it. By 2050 at the latest, all financial flows should contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero and restoring biological diversity.”
I personally refuse to believe that a majority of people in the FIRE community aren’t doing it for mostly selfish reasons. Personally, I’m interested in the subject first and foremost because I think that it’s the best approach to finance I can take for my sanity and overall life enjoyment.
If more people adopt this lifestyle and it requires me to change my methods I’ll be happy to do so, but I don’t consider it foul to accelerate my financial independence “on the back” of greedy consumers.
Effective altruism has been brought up several times in the thread already. To me if someone’s priority, especially with a Swiss salary, is to make the world a better place, that person should keep working until 65 and donate everything they earn after they reach FI. Why would you go and work for charities or go into politics after FI when you developed close to zero skills in that domain during all the previous years? I think that people feel attracted to that because they want to feel heroic, but in the end, we come back to selfish reasons.
To me there is nothing wrong with that but people shouldn’t hide behind idealistic reasoning and embrace the fact that ultimately they want what’s best for them.
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