4 Frightening Ways We're Reverting to the Dark Days of Our Past

[HereSince1628]

16. Yes. But, I suppose it's rationalized because the cost of idle labor can be externalized

-IF- capital isn't shunted/wasted on unemployment benefits and/or wages that allow workers to 'bridge' idle times.

Capitalist ideology runs along the lines that more and more capital is good for everyone, and it would be if capital is put in the service of everyone. But, operationalized capitalism, evidenced by the day-to-day business practices at the level of individuals and corporations whose goal is to maximize ROI and accumulate material wealth demands minimizing every cost that drags on that process.

The unfortunate part of global capitalism is that the benefits of capitalism to a nation (such as the maintenance of standard of living, the presence of a 'middle class' etc. which are the avatars rolled out to suggest the superiority of national capitalistic economies) require reciprocal traffic among all components in a national economic web. Yet the material wealth in contemporary capitalism tends to create reservoirs of concentrated wealth which rather than re-entering the national economic web flow, are either sunk into internationalized derivative financial instruments, or via international investment in production outside the nation...which is to say into external 'sinks' which enable minimization of those nasty dragging costs.

The potential of unused land to capitalism is that it contains resources which have capital value if they can be introduced into private wealth via extraction and marketing.

This resource exploitation also has the value of creating supply, which lowers purchase price and thereby costs of products derived from those resources.