A consequence of phrasing the economy in terms of "competition", "competitors", "rivals", "fights", and so on, is that it implies an eventual victory.
For a successful system, there is never victory. It just continues. But power tends to coagulate. To concentrate. And that leads to things like monarchies, monopolies, and our current situation of monopoly capitalism. Because that fight happens. It is not a well oiled system, it has a victor, who then goes on to bigger and bigger tournaments. Coagulation has been justified to us as a natural phenomenon not to be questioned. And when someone looses that fight, all (or at least most) of their economic clout gets rolled into the victor's clout, thus making them bigger and badder, and more unbeatable.
This is something that can't happen in a real fight. We aren't anime characters who can devour someone's essence. The victor may become more confident, but they don't level up. A hunter does, in a way, but it doesn't make that hunter so much better a hunter, it just keeps them alive. But eventually, the tempering effect of age makes the hunter slower and more noisy, and they eventually can't stay the best hunter in the world.
Corporations and companies and governments don't do this. They just grow. Continually destabilizing the resilience of the economy around them. It becomes more and more like a building with an eroding foundation. Almost as if stones are taken from the foundation to put on the top of the tower just to say, "See! See how great I am! No one has a tower as great as mine!" Somehow, we take this to mean growth is good. Forgetting to consider that for one thing to get more powerful, something else has to lose it as surely as the conservation of mass and energy. The real world, the universe, never gets any bigger. Whenever one gets more, that mean someone else gets less, even if we don't know who is being jilted.
We can't all get more.
No comments:
Post a Comment