lizardlicks:

damnfool-of-a-took:

curlicuecal:

holomanga:

curlicuecal:

nothing highlights how capitalism prioritizes money over people better than the fact that we say that millennials “killed” an industry and not that the industry stopped being wanted

oh no it’s not that it stopped being wanted, that doesn’t do anything. everyone could hate an industry but if we’re stuck in a nash equilibrium too bad

no, no. what actually happens to the industry is that it stops getting money.

I debated on like 7 different words there— being wanted, being profitable, being useful, being competitive, (being affordable)

but yeah, like the key point to me here is that capitalism is *supposedly* all market-driven “it will optimize to provide value and meet demands and this is beneficial to humanity”

and yet when the market is doing that exact thing— “you are not providing sufficient value to create market demand and should do something else”—our language turns around and frames it as if maybe *industries* are the thing that is alive and it is the job of consumers to serve industries by providing sufficient demand to make those industries valuable

(read: profitable)

idk it’s just very weird to me, how the concept of ‘value’ becomes this abstract concept separate from like. value.

industries are supposed to be sustaining people, not the other way around

Basically the whole concept of the free market regulating itself hinges on the idea that people will act rationally and make the most economical decision to meet their needs, but doesn’t account for constraints like “people must eat” or “people must have shelter” (or medications, or whatever).

There’s a nice little graph that pretty much everybody probably gets shown you high school econ (or Econ 101, if your high school didn’t do econ classes) of how far up the price of something can go before a company loses customers, and it’s acknowledged that external factors can influence where that line is, but

1) capitalism naturally trends towards companies eliminating competitors in their industry, and competition is one of the factors that the free market model relies on for the natural regulation of sustainable prices

and

2) people can’t afford to act rationally when their choices are “have necessities for life” or “die”

and those two factors alone are enough to fuck the whole equation right the fuck up. 

And then of course it’s the fault of the consumers for not sustaining the markets, instead of the fault of the markets not being dynamic enough to adjust to the needs of the consumers, because supply-side economics are ridiculous.

#the invisible hand of the free market touched me in a bad place

I’m just gonna sit here and appreciate this tag for a few minutes.