this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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but that won't show in results for next quarter, so they don't care
All they want is money, which has nothing to do with consumers whatsoever. Corporations could extract money by devouring each other, or by taking over a nation state, or by hijacking a treasury department, or by issuing their own money a la crypto. Remember that money is an abstraction (or an instrument) of power. Violently subjugating a region is tantamount to possessing that power (which we call money), or the ability to make others do what you want.
Sure, that’s one practical aspect of money that lends itself to superficial quantitative analysis. But it’s not the whole picture. Money is fundamentally about the power to get people to do things for you. That’s what it represents. With money I can force people to give me things and do things for me, almost like magic.
Now the origins of money is rooted in debt (and power). When a ruling body exercises a monopoly on violence over a region, it can offer promissory notes (IOUs) that others value, because they have faith that this ruling body can force its citizens to work by extracting taxes from them.
Check out “Debt: The Last 5000 Years,” or similar anthropological work on the origins of money.
Have you seen the behavior of parties captured by the capitalist end of the political spectrum? They very much are not the rational actors trying to preserve their own income by keeping consumers alive. If they were they would try to optimize consumer health and spending money instead of aiming for highscore-like accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few that can't spend it on anything meaningful any more anyway because they can already afford everything that could meaningfully improve their life a million times over.
Or, facing conditions where it can no longer do this, it will boil off into fascist autocracy, which seems to be where we're headed.
It looks more like people have to fight a constant battle to keep capitalism in check because capitalism itself is incapable of rational behavior and just does the same things to optimize profits regardless of consequences for any other indicators.