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Comment on One of capitalisms biggest tragedies

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Capitalism is interested in your ability to enhance the bottom line of the company you work for.

That’s a very broad reading of Capitalism as a system of incentives. But when you break it down, you find that it isn’t holistically profit-maximizing. It is locally rent-seeking. Which is to say, if I have a freeway that moves $10M/day in commerce and I - personally - have the opportunity to erect a toll gate that earns me $100k/day but inhibits $1M/day in commerce as a result, I will build that toll gate.

We saw this problem play out with the collapse of the Sears Roebuck Company under CEO Edward Lampert. Lampert took the capitalist ideology to its logical conclusion and began pitting individual departments within the greater corporate behemoth against one another. Consequentially, he dissolved all the economies of scale Sears had aggregated. Far from enhancing the bottom line, his business strategy dissolved all the economies of integration and scale that the firm had built up over its 120 year history.

Wherever the tenants of rent-seeking are applied, individuals with power will attempt to extract surplus wealth from weaker agents beneath them, even when that would destabilize the system as a whole. This can be disastrous for the “bottom line”. We used to even classify it as such, labeling these behaviors as “price gouging” and “embezzlement”.

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applebusch@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wow I’ve never thought of it that way. That makes so much sense. This kind of implies all subscription based services will inevitably devolve into paying more for less in a race to the bottom until the whole thing collapses. Which is interesting because I remember hearing about an economics paper that showed that the most profitable business model is bundled subscriptions. It’s kind of amazing someone can say that with a straight face looking at what has happened to cable TV.

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- zerog_bandit@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You do realize that competition does exist, right?
  
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  - trashgirlfriend@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    lol.
    
    lmao.
    
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zerog_bandit@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Rent seeking is just the latest in a long line of buzz words invented by MBAs to define their profit-seeking practices.

Capitalism rewards the extraction of profit from assets. All the fancy words above dress up the process but in essence remains the same across all industries.

You seem to not like this. I would recommend putting down the phone that are using to browse this website, since it exists due to the aforementioned capitalistic system. Then, go outside, and quite literally touch some grass.

Otherwise, you should probably make peace with your existence within this system, because every human on this Earth is already partaking in it to some degree.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  Rent seeking is just the latest in a long line of buzz words invented by MBAs
  
  Its definitely a term that’s been co-opted by MBAs, but the process of enclosure is centuries old and foundational to the process of capitalist profit-taking.
  
  You seem to not like this.
  
  I’m not a huge fan of negative externalities in business. And profiteering generates enormous externalities.
  
  I would recommend putting down the phone that are using to browse this website, since it exists due to the aforementioned capitalistic system.
  
  Oh no, buddy. I’ve got some terrible news for you. Cellular mobile telephones are a soviet technology. And the entire backbone of the modern domestic telecommunications service was created with public lands, materials, and labor.
  
  The modern cell carriers are simply gatekeepers, charging exorbitant fees to access public works. When the western states copied the USSR’s homework back in the 70s and 80s, no single private business could afford to front the enormous costs associated with the infrastructure. So the Federal Government issued block grants and unleashed (literal) armies of engineers, surveyors, and construction teams to lay the original main arteries. They then tasked a handful of private companies to operate as retail brokers for consumer access and use.
  
  every human on this Earth is already partaking in it to some degree.
  
  The bulk of international digital infrastructure is public works. Always has been. And the cost of accessing these public works varies enormously by state, entirely due to who is tasked with gatekeeping access to the service. US telecomm costs are astronomical, compared to Mexico or Germany or India or South Africa, entirely because the American domestic retailers charge a higher toll.
  
  Incidentally, that’s also why we have some of the slowest and least reliable networks in the post-industrial world. Once we gave up investing in public broadband, public wifi, and public satellite services, the gatekeeping private telecom firms failed to maintain pace with peer nations like Japan and Germany and China and India. Now you can buy a cell phone off the street in New Delhi with a plan that charges pennies and get higher speeds and better coverage than anything T-mobile or AT&T can provide stateside for $100/mo.
  
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  - zerog_bandit@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Lol, I would say that you’re taking a lot of gibberish with no real solutions, but the hilariously fake Soviet propaganda helped me see that you are clearly beyond saving. My best of luck in your crusade!
    
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    UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    the hilariously fake Soviet propaganda
    
    the first handset was born in 1973 weighing in at two kilos.
    
    You’re citing the first retail model sold in a western market, built on technology from 20 years prior.
    
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