Corporate culture is based on constant growth and ever increasing profit margins. Eventually they’ll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
No new cars, no tech gadgets, no fancy dinners, no vacations, no disposable income.
When we get there the economy collapses because there’s no money going into it.
The profits stop rolling in, unnecessary goods stop being produced, and the luxury goods producer’s shut down.
At this point the money they worked so hard to hoard becomes worthless because they can’t buy anything with it.
What’s the endgame for them if their current path takes them to a point where their assets are more or less worthless?
There are 3 key necessities for UBI/freedom dividends:
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It redistributes power not wealth. Bad greed is oligarchy capturing your rulers. UBI weakens politicians discretion, because just paying everyone more cash instead of their corrupt ideas is “idiocracy proof”. Power redistributed to workers where everyone who wants a job gets 5 recruiter calls per day offering a better job. We all get greater power to say no to anything. Quality of life becomes exceptional without crimes of desperation, and the divisive hate that is easily manufactured from crime.
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Redistribution means massive economic growth and overall prosperity even as it all trickles up to make the rich richer. “Velocity of money” is the key economic concept, but as income trickles back up to workers and owners, it means that the rich have to invest more to take all of our money.
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The alternative is genocide. Oligarchy having all of the money and power, and AI/robotics to do work, means robocop detroit for Americans, and war on rest of the world to take their land. It doesn’t matter that far more wealth can be generated with more people to sell stuff to. The logic of pillaging America/world for oligarchs with ever decreasing tax rates on corporations and the rich means more relative wealth and power for the oligarchy and its political minions.
This 3rd point is similar to yours. Except its not just “This is America, if you don’t make money you’re a douchebag”, and the rich just give up on life, it’s “you need to be exterminated because you are useless to the rulership.”
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It’s even better than that, because the massive inequality created by Capitalism has already got us to a state where the human population is going to collapse within the next few decades, even if climate change doesn’t do it first. Simply, most people never feel like they can afford to start a family during the years when they would have started one before. The oligarchs know this and are freaking out about birth rates now, but it’s already too late - can’t be King of the mountain if the mountain is only a hill.
There’s a solution for reducing population while increasing birthrates: war, pandemias and forced inoculations (physically or by peer pressure).
Why would they do any of that when they could simply use HAARP to trigger a Mandela Effect and change reality though? Seems like hard work.
/s, right?
Right?
Don’t forget banning abortion and birth control through moral and legal processes. Time to give birth to the next generation of disposable exploitation.
guillotines
The endgame is feudalism.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling everything through the scam that is private ownership.
What’s the end game for cancer?
There isn’t one, it doesn’t matter that the host dies eventually as long as they get to keep growing for now.
The billionaire space race reminds me of Devil facial tumour disease (NSFL).
It’s the only cancer (that I know of), that can reliably spread to a new host.This is the answer. These people have no plan other than “make more money today”.
Live, laugh, love.
Live in the moment.
YOLO!
🤮
Eloquently phrased.
Have you noticed the rich are suddenly encouraging people to have (more) kids? It’s the only way to put more labor into the system. And labor is what money really represents.
The rich are stealing your labor.
It’s not the only way. We’ve been relying on immigration to do this for us for a long time. American politics is struggling with the tension between racist idiots who don’t understand that immigrants are crucial to our economy, and those who do understand it. You can not be racist AND not understand it and that is fine too, no problem.
It is a mental desease. If I hoard umfathomble amount of newspapers, I would be called a messi. If it is capital wealth, someone is a genius. They collect to fullfill an emptness in themself. It is a delusion. It is never enough and only the continiues ammassing can give them the feeling of success and control. Consumption as a Stimulus. It is not about the amount, it is about the growth. The way you took to the next number/amount. Distancing yourself further from the others. While getting confirmed by enjoying, what many can not affort. Wealth is the main storyline that is understood by every generation and culture around the world and is a globally accepted metric for desire and standing.
There is no Endgame. But a good perspective for them would be something like Elysium, while for us it is more like Gattaca - at best.
It is a mental disease
Yes. As a completely uneducated non-certified internet therapist I’d say that disease is fear. I really believe that those people that strive for more and more do so to try to fix a fear of not having enough. Or a fear of not being enough. Instead of actually trying to recognize the this fear and controlling it, they just do the one thing that can temporarily make them less fearful and that is make more, control more.
It’s probably something like the story within the story For the Benefit of Mankind by Liu Cixin.
They’ll happily lend you money to keep buying stuff. So you end up in perpetual debt. It loops back to feudalism and serfdom in a deliciously ironic twist.
So what’s the way out, you propose?
The line will infinitely approach 0 but never get there. That is what credit is for. The rich will gladly let you borrow their vast wealth to buy the cars and the homes, and in exchange you will be their indentured servant for life. Win Win, economy go brrrrrrr…
What
In short:
If the rich loan you money with interest (banks being the intermediary) they can make money by taking a percentage of the value you produce while also keeping consumer goods flowing. Its already been happening for decades and is how the super rich are able to exist for decades to come.
Eventually they’ll amass so much of the wealth that most of the lower class won’t be able to purchase anything other than essentials like food.
What’s the logic here? Someone else having a high net worth, means that you have less money?
Under the premise that eventually this endless growth cycle reaches some kind of an end point, then ultimately yes. The wealth has to keep increasing somehow. When you have have saturated every market, eliminated every competitor, captured every last regulator, innovated every last facet, optimised every metric, you have to start cutting wages, or replacing labour with machines. When evey worker is replaced or the wages are less than enough for survival no one’s getting paid. Who buys the stuff?
Under the premise that eventually this endless growth cycle
Exactly. It’s endless, so the premise is false. At a certain point they’ll just rename 100 dollar the neodollar, and it continues. It’s just bookkeeping, there’s no end.
Wealth is finite, so yes.
It isn’t? It’s created and destroyed all of the time.
“Created” meaning stolen from labor that is undercompensated, or just outright stolen. “Destroyed” meaning the purported wealth was never real in the first place.
Wealth is defined by resources: access to resources, and ownership of resources. Resources are finite; wealth is finite.
There are plenty of resources in the world to comfortably support all of the people living in the world right now, plus many, many more. Those who own or have access to resources are wealthy. Those who do not, are not.
Those who control the resources extend that control over people who need resources. If there were no people who didn’t have a deficit of resources, then there would also be no people exerting social control based on control of resources.
To accomplish that, most of the resources that the wealthy control must be removed from their control, shifting that control equitably among all. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, one might say.
“Created” meaning stolen from labor that is undercompensated, or just outright stolen. “Destroyed” meaning the purported wealth was never real in the first place.
Creates as in a dude cooks a burger. Destroyed as in someone eats it.
No theft involved.
Not destroyed, merely transformed. Human waste can be turned into fertilizer. Still no theft in sight…
The same as any other accumulation process. Those unable to sustain themselves fall off the bottom and those with any remaining wealth are restratified into a hierarchy of the most to least wealthy.
The cycle begins again!
I don’t think you can think of it as some sort of logical plan. It’s a bug, not a feature, of capitalism. What you are describing is the inevitable end of a completely free market with no regulation. The strong (economically) keep taking from the weak until we have the situation you are describing. From there the next step is dependent upon whether the weak form a cohesive identity and seize power (revolution) or stay fractured around smaller identity cleavages (race, religion, gender, etc) and are subjugated.
It’s tragedy of the commons on a supermassive scale. No one comes out on top in the end, the overprivileged just take a little longer to die. But die they will.
You’re assuming a level of competence for rich people that is unfounded.
For a while it will be that they only have almost all of the money; a small portion will have to go to the workers so that someone exists to run things like power plants and farms and mcdonalds and shit. But eventually robots will replace all that, or slavery
