💾 Archived View for tilde.cafe › ~stack › gemlog › 2022-07-07.corp.gmi captured on 2023-07-22 at 17:25:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Capitalism, a system that gives preference to capital over people's needs, is clearly not something to be proud of. Often confused with 'free-market', capitalism is anything but free market.
A free-market economy is a system in which individuals (not corporations or any state-granted monopolies which are decidedly not free-market!) compete with each other to provide goods and services to other individuals. The end result is that the weak are eliminated, the inefficient replaced by efficient, and price wars result in affordable products and services. Not ideal, but not as bad as what we have now.
In a free market, anyone who finds a niche and manages to eek out a profit, is instantly in competition with others who want some. This continues until a balance is found where a few players squeeze out a reasonable profit, but so low that no sane competitor would bother to enter! It is great for the consumer, and ok for the owners and workers. You get subsistence pay, and everything is cheap. Occasionally someone may make some money for a flitting moment before competition enters, but no billionaires here.
What we have is really awful. Here is how it works:
Central banks, given that monopoly by all-powerful states, will loan infinite amounts of money to very, very large players. Therefore, the goal of corporations (and the few in position to benefit) is to become enormous. Once a certain threshold is passed (too big to fail), the game is entirely different. Corporations can create money out of thin air with accounting tricks.
Needless to say, with a bunch of players that size, the rest of the not-so-free-market tries to pump some of that money out of these enormous bags of cash. Large corporations also don't want to deal with small fish. The competition is really not about anything else other than becoming big. Not efficient, not good at what they do -- just big.
So what are we, the people, mere individuals? We are cattle. Each person is a fractional game ticket -- get enough tickets and up you go. Be it Netflix, American Express, State Farm, Intel. Does not matter. The trick is to round up enough fools into your customer database (and don't bother too much with security, because who cares). Sign them up, and provide the absolute minimum of product or service. Then you get all kinds of perks. You can float stock, issue bonds, or run up your pension fund into a trillion dollar debt.
Remember, the goal is to make the big money. It's not really about providing services or selling goods - that's chicken shit. Giving goods or services away for 'free' to sign up customers is a viable strategy. If some customers complain about the quality, fuck them - there are plenty of fish in the sea.
A century ago, states did not have this power and money -- they had to beg for funds to go to war, and the financial system was there to 'grease the wheels' by providing loans of existing money, the supply of which was limited. Every loan reduced the supply of money, and interest rates would edge up until there was no longer money for stupid, pointless projects like launching shit into space and paving the world, because railroads already did the job. Things were awful in so many ways, and you had disgusting millionaire fucks, but at goods and services were provided.
Now, a few rich assholes get together and decide what the interest rate should be, and the world is at their feet.
In the Soviet Union of past, a bunch of people would likewise get together and write a five-year plan, figuring out everything that needs to be produced by factories. The result was devastating.
In the 'free world', virtually the same thing is happening via financial system. A few privileged shitheads get to decide where the funds go, and guess what -- they go to their friends and relatives. When they are not murdering people in pointless wars, they do useless and pointless shit, while the masses are opiated by social networks, gambling and porn of various kinds.
This is totally disgusting. I want to run, but the entire world is polluted with this shit, and there is simply nowhere to go.