Most Americans just want to make a living, not a killing. Most capitalists, however, start (or buy or invest in) a business to make a killing. Making a killing requires victims/losers -- direct and indirect, seen and unseen, here and overseas. Depending upon the size of the business, and/or the size of the killing, many, many victims/losers are required. If one person makes a ton of money, it's coming out of the hide of others -- often many others. Whether we choose to see this or not is immaterial. It's the way the system works.
Money doesn't multiply itself. It's redistributed, transferred, exchanged. The accumulation of wealth comes about through extraction, primarily from workers, but also from consumers and the earth.
Capitalists make most of their money by radically underpaying workers for the value of their production -- what they produce for the capitalist. If he or she paid fair wages to their workforce, there would be no way for the capitalist to make a killing, just a living -- and that's not good enough for most of them.
(Steve Jobs is a hero to many. But he made his billions by radically underpaying employees who built, supported, serviced, marketed and sold Apple products. Here and abroad. He made his billions because he did not pay fair wages to employees here, but especially in China's Foxconn and places like it. If he had paid fair wages across the board, he could not possibly have made billions. Math and logic don't support alchemy and magic. Justice and fairness don't support that kind of radical inequality, either.
We can have a society where everyone -- as in, everyone -- can make a living. But we can't have a society where everyone makes a killing. Killings, by definition, involve losers, victims, short ends of the stick. A big win requires a lot of big losses somewhere else -- workers, consumers, supply chains, the environment, working conditions, finite natural resources, etc. etc. All or some of the above.
What we have now is a society built around those who want to make a killing. As in, we have economic apartheid. We cater to them, pamper them, coddle them, bail them out endlessly, let them buy and sell our democracy, thus killing it. They like to make a killing.
Which is insane, of course. And to make it more so, the vast majority of us don't want to even play that game. We have no desire to. We don't want to rule over others, boss them around, get them to work for us to make us rich.
Most of us aren't alphas or predators. Very few of us, in fact, want to own, run or buy businesses. Most people have other dreams and goals. Yet we've allowed the dreams and goals of a few to become the focal point of our entire system, and all too many of us have bought into their frame that "freedom and liberty" for capitalists is the same thing as "freedom and liberty" for everyone.
Obviously, it's not. Economic apartheid means unfreedom for everyone who isn't in the ruling class. It's time to end this regime and find a better way.
10:25 PM PT: Wanted to add a link to this excellent article by David Graeber. It describes, among other things, the many reasons why capitalism suppresses or slows innovation and technological progress. Well worth a read.
Of Flying Cars
11:07 PM PT: It should also be noted: IMO, a single proprietor has the greatest chance to engage in fair trade. He or she has the best shot at trading goods or services for a fair price, charging solely for their own labor, skills and costs.
For instance, I build a chair. I make it with my own two hands. I then sell it to you and set a price for my time, skills and costs. I don't charge you for lobbyists I don't have, nor unsold merchandise that does not exist. I don't charge you for ads and marketing firms. And I don't charge you enough to support shareholder dividends. None of these things adds any value to your purchase, yet modern corporations must add that into your price or take it from workers. Given the price constraints due to reduced disposable income for the majority, it's coming out of the pockets of workers.
They must charge the consumer for many things that have nothing to do with the actual thing itself and add zero value. Corporate lawyers and tax attorneys. Government lobbyists and tax accountants. No ad campaign increases the value of your good or service, yet corporations must pass along those costs to consumers, or subtract the costs from their own workforce.
And no consumer benefits from obscenely high executive pay. That ads zero value to the product or service, but someone must pay for it. Again, workers pay.
The further one gets away from that single proprietor, the more actual theft is involved in commerce under capitalism. Theft from workers and theft from consumers. Theft from a public sector that externalizes costs for the corporation, while the corporation does everything in its power to avoid taxation.
Bottom line: for-profit business require winners and losers, and profit itself is a matter of theft -- at least once the business grows beyond the single proprietor. Theft from workers, consumers and the earth. There may be exceptions, but they are all too rare.
Mon Jun 25, 2012 at 6:16 PM PT: Another poster in comments reminded me of another aspect of win/loss. They use the example of buying a laptop. How great it is that we want to spend 2K on a laptop and someone can sell us this laptop for 2K. Aint life grand!
But no transaction in modern capitalism is just about buyer and seller. There is a huge apparatus connected with all of that, a huge supply chain and a huge imbalance among workers and capitalists throughout that chain.
We can purchase that laptop for a low price, and the seller can still make a nice profit, because most of that laptop is built overseas by workers who make pennies on the dollar. We are able to buy cheap goods only because they are built by virtual slave labor, mostly overseas. Someone always has to pay the piper.
Think Foxconn. Think Apple and the dozens of other multi-nationals who outsource their work to that complex. Think about the suicides there and the 16 hour shifts and the 70 cents an hour.
We in the Global North get to have our relatively high standard of living because the vast majority of the rest of the world can't. We in the Global North can consume as much as we do because the vast majority of the rest of the world can't.
Again, this is math, physics, geography. The richest 20% of the world's population consumes 85% of the world's resources. Obviously, that means the bottom 80% can't come even remotely close to consuming as much as we do. They lose, so we can win. It's zero sum, because if they could consume like us, we couldn't consume like we once did anymore. The math doesn't work out. The planet is not getting bigger, nor are its resources.