In a true market economy, you profit by serving your fellow man. You sell what people are WILLING to pay for; the market winnows out the products and services that people are NOT willing to pay for. Monetary profit is the reward for doing the hard work to bring needed or wanted goods and services to market efficiently; bankruptcy is what awaits those who do a poor job of judging the market or of efficiently supplying it.
That's brutal and Darwin-esque for the producers, but as in nature (where deer starve to death in winter if their population isn't thinned by predation), necessary to keep things in balance.
In corporatism -- which is one name for what we actually have, with huge corporations and government working together to control and extract wealth from everyone else -- you profit by buying access to government's monopoly on coercion and violence.
Are Americans happy to see Joe sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, while the American public can barely afford groceries? Of course not, but under a corporatist oligarchy, you don't get to decide what your government does -- and you increasingly have no way to influence big corporations, since they A) have captured government's regulatory ("control") function and B) they get a LOT of their income directly or indirectly from government itself.
As a result of having the game rigged in their favor (and of corporations being essentially psychopathic, with no moral compass thanks to legal protections for the individuals at the top), the big corps have enough money to bribe anyone and everyone who matters and eventually makes even murder seem nothing more than another tool to get what the corporation wants.
In a true market economy, you profit by serving your fellow man. You sell what people are WILLING to pay for; the market winnows out the products and services that people are NOT willing to pay for. Monetary profit is the reward for doing the hard work to bring needed or wanted goods and services to market efficiently; bankruptcy is what awaits those who do a poor job of judging the market or of efficiently supplying it.
That's brutal and Darwin-esque for the producers, but as in nature (where deer starve to death in winter if their population isn't thinned by predation), necessary to keep things in balance.
In corporatism -- which is one name for what we actually have, with huge corporations and government working together to control and extract wealth from everyone else -- you profit by buying access to government's monopoly on coercion and violence.
Are Americans happy to see Joe sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, while the American public can barely afford groceries? Of course not, but under a corporatist oligarchy, you don't get to decide what your government does -- and you increasingly have no way to influence big corporations, since they A) have captured government's regulatory ("control") function and B) they get a LOT of their income directly or indirectly from government itself.
As a result of having the game rigged in their favor (and of corporations being essentially psychopathic, with no moral compass thanks to legal protections for the individuals at the top), the big corps have enough money to bribe anyone and everyone who matters and eventually makes even murder seem nothing more than another tool to get what the corporation wants.
Not happy with what Amazon is doing? Tough sh*t.