So, you are a Capitalist?
Capital is a broad term for financial, physical, or human assets that provide value, generate income, or are used to produce goods and services. It represents resources employed to create wealth or drive economic growth, including cash, machinery, property, and intellectual property.
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It is interesting, because people see capitalism as a political position, with the opposing force being socialism. Fair enough I guess, but I think that the problem with that differentiation is that the capital people generally speak about at its core, is money, which is highly conceptual and therefore, easy to manipulate in multiple ways. The reason that gold is considered a safe haven, is that it is physical and even though there is a lot of influence exerted through market forces on the price, the fact is, gold is there, regardless of price.
Key Aspects and Types of Capital:
- Financial Capital: Cash, equity, and debt used by businesses to fund operations, pay expenses, and invest in growth.
- Physical/Real Capital: Tangible, manufactured assets like machinery, buildings, and technology used in production.
- Human Capital: The skills, knowledge, and experience possessed by individuals.
The big problem with capitalism is that it eats itself by the very nature of how it operates. Essentially, it is always moving with increasing concentration toward a monopoly, and the only reason it doesn't get there is that the imbalance and inequality is so high, that revolutions overthrow powers and redistribution of some kind is forced in an "off with their heads" process.
Automation and now AI is the capitalist dream, because it is about creating efficiencies so that the cost of production keeps decreasing, and profits therefore can increase. However, this is just a catalyst that drives capitalism to eat itself faster, eventually creating a situation where no matter how efficient a corporation is, there is no longer enough of a market to generate demand. Because the thing with business is that it needs customers and once the customer base is too thin, the entire supply chain collapses. Even if people want a product, if they can't afford it, they can't buy it.
I want a Ferrari.
I can't have one, unless I steal it.
And this is one of the major issues with using a token as capital, because it isn't an indicator of the reality of the situation of the market. Tokens really are a brilliant mechanism so that trade can happen between items of unequal worth, but as soon as the token became the product, it entered into a death loop, because while tokens are unlimited, physical resources are scarce. To get around this, more tokens are issued, more inflation created, but the same physical reality exists.
In a hypothetical but also possible world where all base tasks for human need is automated and generated without human intervention, we as a species would have to entirely recalibrate our understanding of value. We'd have to do this, whether the corporations want it or not, because in that scenario, there wouldn't be enough people earning to support business operations. Even if there was a basic income of some kind, the books just don't balance.
The only true economic balance is in the physical world.
We can create all the fancy algorithms we want, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters in terms of capital, is what is physical. The resources we have available to us, and what we are able to do with them. Whether it be natural resources, or human resources, the physical world really is all that matters.
As said many times before, the problem with the profits currently is that money is the goal, because it is capital that can be used to generate more capital. However, what really needs to happen is that rather than a token as the marker of success, wellbeing should be the "profit" of business activity. The more wellbeing created, the more successful the business. But as you can see, that means that there is no token, so success is no longer tied to an imaginary concept, but a physical outcome. That creates problems for corporations, right?
Absolutely.
But as said, if the only thing that really matters is the physical reality in which we live, that change has to happen and it starts to look somewhat like a socialist system. However, What I think we should start doing is moving away from the political sides entirely and instead start becoming more humanist in our approach, where life is about generating value through meaning, scientific discovery, and improvement of the self, and the community.
Money isn't required in that scenario though, so it will never start to shift that way, until it is likely too late to recalibrate humanity for survival and thriving.
Taraz
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