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Growth (and other problems)

The flimsy house of cards pyramid scheme growth economy is one of the problems of market capitalism. The other is exploitation of the value-add of labor. Wealth disparity, classism, and exploitation can haunt even a sustainable economy.

So externalities (which is what makes the “growth” promise so fake and flimsy) and exploitation are two separate problems of market capitalism that we need to address; some exploitation is of the externalitites loophole and some is of labor.

Money ultimately come from three sources, the first of which is legitimate:

Services (including things such as care, organization, transport, or refinment of goods, like turning planks into shelter or plants into a meal)
Under-accountably polluting or plundering the environment (including lithosphere mining and space junking)
Buying and profiting of underpriced things, like labor in a labor market where the workers are facing eviction and starvation

The market has one job: figure out the cost and the value of something. And it can’t even do that one thing properly, instead settling for an artificial “price” set by supply and demand. When that price is higher than the cost, you can profit by selling; when it’s lower than the value, you can profit by buying.

That’s why market capitalism stands to gain as the precariat suffers; it lowers the price for labor so capitalists can buy labor at a profit.

In the US at the time of writing we are seeing prices of housing and consumer goods increasing at a much faster rate than labor; so even as wages are “going up”, they are being outraced by everything else including the value of money itself.

Meaning exploitation of labor is more profitable than ever.

Meaning many workers are suffering.