from my twitter: https://twitter.com/grapholect
I started noticing this the more disposable income I got. It starts off with small things like, if there’s a sale at Costco for $20 off a tub of protein powder, I could buy 3 or 4 at a time to save $60 – $80 off something I use everyday because I can put up the upfront cost. Same with at the veterinarian, if I buy 9 months of flea prevention or heartwork, I get 3 months free.
Then things like at the bank, I get free services like free cashiers checks, free safety deposit box etc. My interest rates are super low on my line of credit etc. I get free shit all the time from points on my credit card.
So yeah, the more you have, the cheaper things get.
That’s because an economy where things are arbitrarily assigned values is chaos in practice. Everything that everyone can possibly own or use is given an inflated value for the sole purpose of extracting more economic power out of the ones without leverage or choice in the matter. The worse your standing position, the less leverage you have, the more you will be pressured into giving up. Capitalism creates this endless vicious cycle where every person is finding a way to take advantage of one another.
Where everyone tells you “money can buy goods and services,” people are unaware of the other half of it, that the value of those goods and services depends on how much economic power you have in contrast to those that are in greater need. When you have more money, the shoes you want to buy have their cost reduced by 5% because they can’t take as much advantage of you as they can for the poorer folk.
The sellers can still gain their profit but sacrifice how much profit they take in because there is less of an economic power structure in your case. They make a bulk deal with you to attract you away from competitors (thus they deliberately try to starve each other in the process) while claiming you’re a special customer and making you feel like you matter when in reality “there’s always a sucker to walk in the door.” They are calculating risk all the time. If everyone took advantage of the bulk prices you can bet they’d stop doing it.
What this all means is that the people who contribute the highest amount of profit are in fact the ones who lack any power or choice. The optimization that every business inherently seeks is to be the only choice for desperate customers. That is why there are so many monopolies, so many conglomerates, and so many stagnant, underpaid wages.
And the reason why reformists face an uphill battle is that they are naive and believe that they can just tell the world the benefits of financially empowering everyone and people will jump on board. That is not the case. Financial empowerment is antithetical to the desires of a private corporation. Regulations are antithetical. Unions are antithetical. Safety is antithetical. Your well-being is antithetical. If it doesn’t contribute to the power imbalance that optimizes what economic power someone in capitalism can extract out of other people, then it is value they consider lost.
ugh 