Forum Post: What It's Really All About!

Imagine you have a small family farm. You grow your own fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, livestock and enough surplus to trade for the things you want and need to make life sustainable and tolerable. Along with others in your community, who do likewise or make some other useful desirable thing to trade, you form an economy that is sufficient for simple survival. It works because individuals both work for their own wants and needs and cooperate. There's trade amongst the producers and all contribute to building and maintaining the things they need in common. Roads and other infrastructure or first responders and military if the community is large and complex enough are things all reasonable, responsible people will support.

No matter how large or complex a community and its economy become, the basic production, distribution and infrastructure that facilitates activity will be at the heart of it. That hasn't changed since Adam and Eve hunted and gathered in the Garden of Eden. That's what it's really all about. But is that what capitalism is really all about?

Capitalism is about controlling the economic system and profiting by its ownership or its, and our, indebtedness to those who own or hold the paper on the economy. The economy is, in the first place, our works, our homes, our food supply, our medicine ... our livlihood. Capitalism is not the heart of our economy.

Capitalism is about power and control. We are utilized or discarded for the profit of or at the whim of owners who may never come closer to us than halfway round the world. Today, they tell us that's human nature. If that's what we've devolved to since the beginning of civilization, I say: "To hell with this civilization!!!"

We're payed to work in the material industries we built in the employ of the industrialist who evolved into or were supplanted by the capitalists of the FIRE sector. With one or another control mechanism, this is what's been happening since the beginnings of agricultural civilization about ten thousand years ago.

Some of us, the lucky ones, are paid more to manage the debt and wage slaves - or actual slaves since that's still happening, though extra-legally, in the global economy. The masters ever reduce salaries and the number of decent jobs - or any jobs at all - while forcing us ever deeper in debt or the near starvation of welfare. The law, the basis of civilization and its defining characteristic, won't protect us from capitalist parasites. The law/government is on the side of those who've bought and paid for it.

The government won't tax the parasites to save us or itself. Instead, like us, it goes into debt to them for the money to support their greed with sham contracts and debt service. Like our cell phones or cable, we and our government pay much more than anything is worth. They take and take some more. And then there's the bailouts that are negative tax to the FIRE sector. That's where your tax money goes but many of you think it's the poor who have wrecked the economy. (Seriously?! Where are the poor stashing all those trillions? If you find where their sheltered offshore accounts are we can tax them.) The money borrowed from the real ruling elite is the money they skim off the real economy that we built with our own hard work, generations ago.

The real economy falters and fails to produce and distribute the goods to the populations that need them, while the masters gain ever more property, money, control and power. They tell the government and everyone else what to do and even force privatization [sell assets to pay debts then lease it back and pay forever] of once common infrastructures that become rental streams to enrich them further.