Post B12IOOn3uXZgcLFpjs by drahardja@sfba.social
 (DIR) More posts by drahardja@sfba.social
 (DIR) Post #B12IOOn3uXZgcLFpjs by drahardja@sfba.social
       2025-12-07T09:32:14Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       One problem with #capitalism, especially around publicly-traded companies, is that there is really nothing that prevents a group of rich people from buying up a popular company, saddling it with debt to the purchaser’s company, then bleeding it dry of cash, slowly ruining its products, and then selling the corpse for parts. This often nets the buyer a tidy profit, but leaves employees without a job, and customers without a product they love.What possible countervailing force exists in a capitalist system to stop this? Absolutely nothing. Everything is above-the-table legal. All buyers need is enough money to purchase the company outright. Then squeeze, profit, discard.Capitalism assumes people will try to profit by providing goods and services that customers are willing to buy for a premium. This assumption is often used to justify the glorification of capitalism, but this assumption is obviously false. The greatest profiteers in capitalism are “financial engineers” that produce nothing of actual value.
       
 (DIR) Post #B12IOTqn66WoJM2NkG by drahardja@sfba.social
       2025-12-08T02:01:59Z
       
       0 likes, 1 repeats
       
       The idea that #capitalism is a system beneficial to society is entirely predicated on the idea that people will primarily try to make a profit by offering products and services that others need. This premise is as bogus as the now-debunked school of Rational Economics, in which people were assumed to make only rational, self-preserving, long-term-beneficial choices. We now know that people make all kinds of irrational choices based on fashion, addiction, deception, convenience, and any number of other factors.It’s even more patently obvious that the profits-for-public-benefit assumption that undergirds Capitalism is equally false. The greatest profiteers in our capitalistic societies are pretty obviously people who can extract the most labor without paying, put up the tallest barriers, invent the trickiest financial sleights-of-hand, and most effectively destroy representative governments.The FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION of Capitalism is a lie. The system DOES NOT WORK.
       
 (DIR) Post #B12IOYzpxtjeGrJB2W by drahardja@sfba.social
       2025-12-08T02:10:06Z
       
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       I think in the micro- to mid-scales, where competition is strong and barriers to market entry are low, the correlation between profits and benefits provided can often still hold. But it fades away quickly with scale and monopoly. Even small-scale companies in modestly-sized metro areas quickly become detached from this correlation when they become even slightly dominant, or when “financial engineering” comes into the picture. The shift from “honest business offering products and services for profit” to “extractive capitalist enterprise” happens quickly and at shockingly small scales. Anyone who has bought a second house in Silicon Valley as “investment property” has entered this game: they have taken an incredibly scarce resource that people need to live, and turned it into a barrier for passive extraction of the value of labor.#capitalism
       
 (DIR) Post #B12IOde2gMGwgi9LGK by drahardja@sfba.social
       2025-12-08T02:18:30Z
       
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       I believe that every step we take farther from making a profit by selling desirable goods and services has an exponentially harmful effect on society, and requires exponentially more stringent regulations.One step removed may be something like lending money at an interest. Two steps may be raising capital by selling shares. Three steps may be options or futures trading, then purely gambling on markets, and so on. The further removed an activity is from actually offering goods and services, the more tightly regulated and discouraged it should be.To encourage this, we must guarantee a minimum standard of living for everyone. Universal basic income and universal healthcare will return tremendous power to workers to negotiate better work conditions (which is probably why we don’t have them in the US), which will lead to an ability for the masses to refuse to take part in extractive, capitalist enterprises.