zlacker

I mean, that's just late stage capitalism. Growth is required, every revenue stream must have all slack taken out of it. Any money left in the market is inefficiency which capitalism inherently rewards those who can remove inefficiencies. A perfectly balanced market means that every exploitable dollar is, in fact, exploited, which means the poors can't have anything. Whatever money must be paid to them must be then recouped.

And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.

The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.

>>Toucan+(OP)
You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers. Arguably when you empower a doctors and lawyers class driving bmws and buying flights to aspen, they are spending proportionally more of their money in the economy than the billionaire class ahead of them that would have sat on this money if they extracted it by now and dumped it into gold bonds and land or something stupid like that instead of something that generates actual economic activity. And if you had them so poor they could barely afford food then there would be no BMW and no Aspen.

>>asdff+w2
I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but I'm not in charge here, and our current batch of elites in power seem content to coast out the collapse, pocketing every dollar they can as the world crumbles around them. I don't personally think it's a good long term plan, and to be fair, numerous economists and even billionaires have come out saying that the world is not in a good way. But they still use their power to maintain the status quo and not foster badly needed change, so it's difficult to assess to what degree this is legitimate thought on their part, or simply saying what they know will sound good as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth.

The solutions here aren't arcane magic or anything: Money needs to leave the rich, and get to the working class to re-stabilize consumer habits. But since the Reagan era's slashing of all manner of corporate regulations, the system seems either incapable or unwilling to let that happen, no matter how much of an imminent threat it presents to that system. So we go on and circle the drain.

>>asdff+w2
> You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers.

With increased financializarion and abstraction of tradable assets - the capital class no longer has to worry about "goods" or "customers" (in as much as they may be indicators of bad stocks with a dim future). Services are the future: as far as they are concerned, the amount of profits available in housing or healthcare may be infinite, of you need the chart to go up, increase the price of the cancer drugs in your portfolio.

>>Toucan+64
> as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth

It truly is, too.

I do appreciate the tropes of "It is the year 4,000 BC, and you are immortal, the pyramids are being built. You make $10,000 a day, tax-free, and spend none of it..."

But even that is hard to digest.

I'm in my mid-40s. If I tell my friends, "Someone gave you a million dollars a day, every single day since you've been born. And yet, there are multiple people out there with ten times more money than you," it becomes more digestible.

And still just as unconscionable.

>>sangno+Vj
Most countries have national healthcare systems which have pricing power over "cancer drugs". When those are expensive it's they're because genuinely very expensive to make, and increasingly they're personalized because every cancer is different.