it is extremely unfortunate that the non-government organisations that provide us with the products and services we need to live comfortably tend to be profit-crazed psychopaths that would eat their own children for a profit if they were able to have sex and bear children.
of course, advocates for the profit-crazed psychopath organisations (‘corporations’) keep telling us that there is no other way, if we don’t want profit-driven psychopath organisations then we are all going to have to sit in front of static televisions and starve to death because we have no jobs to go to and everyone will just start killing each other because the police aren’t getting paid and the sky has fallen down.
of course, that is complete bullshit — free enterprise (i.e. not state communism/capitalism) is only possibly without the heartless exploitation and degradation of western laissez-faire (french for: ‘it’s cool to fuck over your brothers and sisters’) capitalism.
there is a stupid false dichotomy in modern economics speak that a company is either profitable or not viable, but really, as a social good, a business needs only to balance the books and continue forward through time, pay the workers and management and keep rolling on with the goods/service provision.
profit (a continuously and deliberately sustained surplus) is undoubtedly theft from the community — after you have paid all the workers fairly, any money left over has been earned by no-one, to shovel that money back to the people who have already wrangled enough money to be lending it out in large quantities over the long-term is nothing short of usury.
being concerned first and foremost with profit puts pressure to do everything unfairly and irresponsibly — underpay workers, attempt to increase the productivity of each worker unit with no regard to their well-being, overcharge users/consumers as much as possible, externalise company costs to the community, spare any expense no matter what the cost to the environment, increase demand/frequency of resupply, etc..
i can hear all the rich ‘business’ dicks going berserk already, to cover changes in demand from quarter to quarter, companies can just keep a ‘surplus’ of ‘liquidity’ to a level appropriate to their annual turnover (i.e. some fucking cash) to see them through lean times or the times during which they must alter their business to better serve the public good, to better suit the market that has been determined by consumers in full command of their critical faculties.
i can imagine a time when companies can actually do all the things that the bosses of profit-crazed psychopath organisations cynically claim to do these days — that is, provide great jobs and great goods/services to the community without ripping anyone off and while minimising/mitigating the environmental impacts of the enterprise.
these sorts of businesses would also be receptive to the realisation that their business is environmentally unsound and must give way/transition to a different way of doing things.
it is obvious these days that profit-crazed psychopath organisations only do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the business notion of ‘enlightened’ self-interest really means: ‘trick them into thinking you’re nice so that you can fleece them more effectively over the long term’ — there is nothing enlightened about that at all.
of course, a system of non-profits like this might mean we would have to dismantle the entire stock exchange/casino system (great!) and large companies/businesses would have to be owned by no-one, be taken care of by the custodians currently working with them, or be owned by some benevolent entity that doesn’t expect a return (the state as public trust).
seen as all the majority of economists have been doing for the last few decades is apologising for the views of rich twats who want to become richer and twattier, i’ll let them do something useful for a change and figure out the details of how to transition the current economy toward the brave new world of actually-free enterprise — i am totally unqualified and can’t understand the absolute bullshit double-speak the economists have turned economic discussion into anyways.
the problems are huge — with every first-worlder’s savings in the stock market, every first-worlder’s super in the stock market, and every first-worlder’s materialism through the roof, how the fuck are we going to dismantle this system and realise saner days where everyone is happy to have modest amounts of money saved without expecting it to magically grow itself?
profit is the new usury, and like the many ethically concerned religious traditions that forbade usury, i believe profit is a socially destructive practice that needs to end.
i sure as fuck don’t have the answers, but i am certain that these are the important questions — the important questions us first-worlder’s conveniently avoid (as we burn the last of the fossil fuels and pretend everything is fine).
