Capitalism has 2 fundamental weaknesses that people universally ignore.
1. A corporation is a living organism (ie in the abstract, not biological sense) that needs to be fed to survive.
In a system where resources are scarce (ie there's a hard limit on how much that can be extracted from the market), dominated by organisms that are expected to grow indefinitely or die; eventually one of three things are going to happen.
First, the market becomes completely saturated, the organism quits growing, capital is devalued, and the organism suffers a slow/painful death at great cost to the stakeholders.
Second, the organism diversifies and grows in size/power beyond the limits of the market so it starts consuming other organisms and/or artificially raises prices to extract more value at the current expense. Ie asset inflation which acts as a hidden tax on the entire ecosystem.
Third, the organization buys back the its shares, converts to a private company, and adjusts operations in a manner that emphasizes long-term sustainability over growth. This almost never happens 'in the wild' and never happens in the interest of 'sustainability'. Offering to buy off the existing stakeholders without uncontested majority voting rights is the same as handing them a blank check. A realistic 'best case' is that the value-producing stakeholders fork off and create a new private company.
People seem to be shocked that large companies act in an amoral manner. I'd be shocked to see a corporation continue to act in a moral manner after growing to sufficient size. Just try to see the corporation as a living organism. In terms of life-or-death decisions, survival is paramount to morality every time.
What's worse, when an organization grows sufficiently large enough to challenge/undermine the authority of governments. They can stimulate changes in government policy via corruption, park/move capital/operations to locations lacking restrictions, purchase large quantities of government debt and profit from the shortfall of the system that they've been actively starving of resources.
Capitalism is an amazingly successful model for fast-paced growth but self-defeating in terms of long-term (read multi-generation) sustainability.
2. In pure capitalistic terms, people are assets.
What happens when a market becomes diluted with more assets than demand can justify? The value of those assets goes down.
By virtue of competitiveness, companies will always strive for efficiency. To produce more value with less. It's a basic fact that with increases advances in technology, it requires fewer people to maintain and/or increase the current standard of living.
High-earning capitalists perceive themselves as winners of the race, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the greater their ratio of success the greater that success taxes the sustainability of the wider ecosystem.
In an ecosystem of scarcity we can either have fewer people with a higher median standard of living operating at a higher level of efficiency, a greater population living at a lower median standard of living, or a mix of the two where efficient producers are incentivized with special privilege to subsidize the non-contributing existence of the rest.
Either way, we're approaching an upper limit to the quantity of useless shit we can realistically expect people to willingly consume. Capital is being concentrated at an ever-increasing rate and it's being used to purchase assets at artificially inflated values and charge high rates for access.
In California specifically. Capital is being parked in 'investment properties', in many cases by foreign investors. Ever increasing rent rates are being leveraged to extract more from the working class. The people responsible for purchasing the most goods/services have less to spend. Even people who make double the national median income struggle to afford rent and have zero prospects of purchasing in the near and long term. Companies that produce goods suffer as their consumer base is starved. The cycle of capital concentration continues.
1. A corporation is a living organism (ie in the abstract, not biological sense) that needs to be fed to survive.
In a system where resources are scarce (ie there's a hard limit on how much that can be extracted from the market), dominated by organisms that are expected to grow indefinitely or die; eventually one of three things are going to happen.
First, the market becomes completely saturated, the organism quits growing, capital is devalued, and the organism suffers a slow/painful death at great cost to the stakeholders.
Second, the organism diversifies and grows in size/power beyond the limits of the market so it starts consuming other organisms and/or artificially raises prices to extract more value at the current expense. Ie asset inflation which acts as a hidden tax on the entire ecosystem.
Third, the organization buys back the its shares, converts to a private company, and adjusts operations in a manner that emphasizes long-term sustainability over growth. This almost never happens 'in the wild' and never happens in the interest of 'sustainability'. Offering to buy off the existing stakeholders without uncontested majority voting rights is the same as handing them a blank check. A realistic 'best case' is that the value-producing stakeholders fork off and create a new private company.
People seem to be shocked that large companies act in an amoral manner. I'd be shocked to see a corporation continue to act in a moral manner after growing to sufficient size. Just try to see the corporation as a living organism. In terms of life-or-death decisions, survival is paramount to morality every time.
What's worse, when an organization grows sufficiently large enough to challenge/undermine the authority of governments. They can stimulate changes in government policy via corruption, park/move capital/operations to locations lacking restrictions, purchase large quantities of government debt and profit from the shortfall of the system that they've been actively starving of resources.
Capitalism is an amazingly successful model for fast-paced growth but self-defeating in terms of long-term (read multi-generation) sustainability.
2. In pure capitalistic terms, people are assets.
What happens when a market becomes diluted with more assets than demand can justify? The value of those assets goes down.
By virtue of competitiveness, companies will always strive for efficiency. To produce more value with less. It's a basic fact that with increases advances in technology, it requires fewer people to maintain and/or increase the current standard of living.
High-earning capitalists perceive themselves as winners of the race, and rightly so. Unfortunately, the greater their ratio of success the greater that success taxes the sustainability of the wider ecosystem.
In an ecosystem of scarcity we can either have fewer people with a higher median standard of living operating at a higher level of efficiency, a greater population living at a lower median standard of living, or a mix of the two where efficient producers are incentivized with special privilege to subsidize the non-contributing existence of the rest.
Either way, we're approaching an upper limit to the quantity of useless shit we can realistically expect people to willingly consume. Capital is being concentrated at an ever-increasing rate and it's being used to purchase assets at artificially inflated values and charge high rates for access.
In California specifically. Capital is being parked in 'investment properties', in many cases by foreign investors. Ever increasing rent rates are being leveraged to extract more from the working class. The people responsible for purchasing the most goods/services have less to spend. Even people who make double the national median income struggle to afford rent and have zero prospects of purchasing in the near and long term. Companies that produce goods suffer as their consumer base is starved. The cycle of capital concentration continues.