For the last three hundred years or so we more northerly North Americans have used an economic model called “capitalism” that is implemented through agents called corporations. The corporate-capitalist model got started way back in Roman times, when primitive corporations were permitted to exist only if they served a public service that was good for the community as a whole—a new highway, say, or a temple to the goddess Juno. But those fell when Rome fell. Then through eight-hundred years of Middle Ages, they were replaced by odd economic models such as feudalism and mercantilism. Corporations as we know them returned in our early colonial times and have evolved up to a logical extreme in modern times.

Capitalism is a simple idea: you manipulate money to make money. For example, you and some others “incorporate” by pooling your money so you collectively can afford to finance some money-making scheme none of you could afford to finance alone. When the profits come in and you’ve paid off the debts, all remaining surplus gets divvied up among you. If your profit is more than you originally invested, you win—you have leisurely increased your wealth by manipulating things so that other people did the actual work.

Modern corporations exist to produce profit. Period. They do not, repeat do not, exist to provide any public service;  if they do so that is coincidental to the profit-making reason for their existence. Big ones tend to become monopolies: examples include for-profit electricity producers that can exist only as monopolies, and gigantic semi-monopolies such as Walmart, Google, Amazon, Apple and Tesla. Monopolies dislike competition and try to eliminate it because it inhibits how much they can charge for whatever they sell. Capitalism is more dynamic among the thousands of smaller corporations that truly compete in truly free enterprise, which is good because competition holds down the prices people must pay for goods and services they need.

Modern capitalism’s roots germinated in Europe not long after 1492. Adventurers returning home with exaggerated tales of a New World fabulously rich with gold soon triggered a gold-rush frenzy implemented pretty much as follows. European gentry wanting to wrest gold from New World natives would pool their monies to fund the cost of a ship, crew, some troops, muskets and powder—a significant investment. The investors knew that if their joint venture survived the risks of shipwreck (and possibly violent resistance by the natives who owned the gold), they would likely become enriched with shares far exceeding the cost of their initial investments. Much loot was carried home, initially to Spain which prospered greatly thereby.

On this basis early investors became classic capitalist gamblers, gambling that their venture would survive the customary risks, e.g.: 1) if the natives defeated the attempts to steal their gold, or 2) the ship sank during its getaway, their investments would be forfeit. Such is the lot of buyers of corporate shares in all times and circumstances—in the end what they do is not unlike the roulette wheel. Many adore the adrenalin rush, just like in casinos. You’ll either win or you won’t. Fifty-fifty odds—right?

Fast forward five hundred years. Today’s corporations work pretty much the same as those early corporations, but multiplied by a zillion. While straining to maintain the appearance of respectability, or at least anonymity, all corporations today follow three imperatives: 1) increase profits, 2) cut costs, and 3) eliminate competition. Pursuit of these three imperatives involves both obvious and less-than-obvious devices—some extreme, some devious, some barely-legal or patently illegal—generally as follows.

Increase profits: Priority 1: The quickest, easiest way to increase profits is to 2) cut costs. Thus chinching on, reducing or eliminating employee wages is an ever-present front-end consideration. Corporations’ massive incentive to underpay the employees who do the actual work that produces the actual wealth is the principal cause of poverty among non-farm workers who depend on the corporate labor market for their income. Priority 2: buy out other corporations that sell products human beings cannot live without, such as food, clothing and shelter that people have no choice but to buy and keep on buying. Priority 3: overproduce a product without regard to actual demand, and quickly follow with an advertising blitz to create artificial demand for that product, the objective being to persuade consumers to buy something they would not otherwise have thought of buying. Priority 4: actually and honestly sell more of whatever products you sell. This lowest-priority option is less favored because it lacks the pizazz of Priority 3, and necessarily requires the cost of advertising to persuade consumers to buy products they otherwise wouldn’t. It also explains the out-of-control wasteland of distracting-flashing-pop-up ads that clutter every sign-on to the internet, a replacement for the former Chew Mailpouch Tobacco signs painted on barns beside major highways.

Cut costs: See Priority 1, Increase Profits. Priority 2: Avoid your fair share of taxes, which large corporations accomplish in a multitude of inventive ways, such as planting a phony headquarters on a Caribbean island that imposes very low taxes for the express purpose of luring tax-avoiding corporations into its treasury. Priority 3: Costs also get cut via the device of investing in robots that permanently eliminate the jobs of workers who expect to be paid wages so they can buy groceries. The recent advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is hailed as the cost-cutting way of the future that will lead inevitably to elimination of all jobs except those few managers who control the switches that turn the robots on and off. AI is being pursued with great diligence and considerable success by large corporations of every nature across the USA, while layoffs and workforce reductions are mounting exponentially as of this writing.

Eliminate competition: One of capitalism’s principle laws requires Pharisee-like public adulation of competition while doing everything in one’s power to eliminate it. Eliminating competition can be straightforward or devious, depending on which approach is more likely to succeed in the circumstances. The simplest way, to simply buy out the competitor with a tempting bolus of cash, is favored by large corporations confronted by innovative small entrepreneurs full of bright ideas that would give consumers better products at lower prices. By this simple device thousands of creative new entrepreneurial small corporations are removed from the free-enterprise marketplace every year. More complex methods to the same end involve leveraged buyouts and hostile takeovers whereby the big corporations eat smaller corporations, thereby eliminating the competition they represent. Large corporations hate competition.

Capitalism as religion

In the United States of America capitalism is today so utterly entrenched that most citizens are unaware of its presence. It is unnoticed background, taken for granted like the ground we walk on and the air we breathe. When it happens to be noticed, it is assumed to be the only possible way we can conduct business in the USA. It is unthinkingly accepted—on those few occasions when someone happens to think about economics at all—as the only way supply-and-demand economics could possibly be conducted.

Capitalism is further unthinkingly accepted as “one of the two ways” in which economics can be conducted. It is assumed that the other option—one of only two options—is communism. Communism is an expletive in the United States—like the n-word, just mouthing the word communism is as politically incorrect as standing and shouting shit in church. Your average American unthinkingly thinks there are two and only two options for how we set ourselves up to systematically supply the demand of people for the things they need to stay alive—food clothing and shelter—plus some insurance, some transportation and a little fun. That’s it—two options: capitalism or communism. Right? And since communism is Satan’s work, it has to be capitalism. Right? And furthermore “socialism” is the very same thing as “communism,” two synonyms that we use interchangeably—right?—so we can’t have that either.

The truth is this: there are literally dozens of ways in which we could set ourselves up to provide the basic life needs of all American citizens. Some of those ways would leave no one in poverty. Some would permit bright entrepreneurs to flourish, and become wealthier than others, without anyone becoming impoverished—as if the pie were only so big, and as if wealth could only be obtained at the expense of others, as so many assume. In writings to follow we shall explore some of these other options. If capitalism and communism were both banished from the earth, as they should be, no person anywhere would have to live in poverty. Every last human being could have adequacy—that minimum of food, clothing and shelter no human can live without. And the hard chargers would be absolutely free to become richer than those others who don’t particularly value being rich but also don’t enjoy being poor and at risk of starving.

And greedy, price-gouging, politically-controlling corporations?—they would be gone. This is possible—not idealistically, but literally. Stay tuned to this space. Feel free to comment in the space provided.