• TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today
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    17 days ago

    would love their ideology to be accepted common sense rather than current one

    The crazy thing is that the current economic system we utilize isn’t considered nonsensical.

    I guess an economic system that requires infinite growth made a bit more sense during the age of discovery, when people were actively finding new continents to exploit. One would think that now we’ve definitively concluded we inhabit a closed system with a finite amount of natural resources, maybe just maybe we could evolve our economic system to reflect that?

    • psivchaz@reddthat.com
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      17 days ago

      I don’t even think capitalism requires infinite growth. It’s just how we built it. Not even since the beginning. That is, you could buy stock in a company to help them grow. Then they make a profit, and give you a share of that profit. Everyone is happy. You could sell that to someone else, and maybe they pay more than you’d get in a year, but they’ll make more in a long run as long as the company stays alive and can keep distributing profits. Everyone is happy.

      It’s this idea that the money you make from investment should grow exponentially. This demand from professional stock traders that they be able to sell for obscene profits. The company must grow, and those profits must grow, or the shareholders will all sell in a panic and abandon them, and even a profitable company may go under.

      Like why can’t the company just make some profit and distribute that profit among shareholders and employees and everyone be happy? It doesn’t HAVE to be more profit next year than last year, we just made it that way over time.