The narrator said: Ye Yu, I want to ask you, since in reality the wealth of the rich accounts for 80% of the total wealth of society, isn't it enough to encourage the rich to consume? We shouldn’t pay more attention to the important role of the rich in the economic cycle and encourage the rich to consume instead of encouraging the poor to consume, right?
Ye Yu said: Your question can be regarded as asking about the lifeblood of capitalism.
Capitalism has three hurdles that cannot be overcome. Marx saw it, so he created socialism
The first hurdle is that capitalism cannot avoid the Matthew Effect. In fact, this problem is not only a problem of capitalism, but also a problem of all private ownership.
To put it simply, under the private ownership system, the big fish eat the small fish. The big fish get bigger and bigger, and the small fish become fewer and fewer. Finally, the small fish disappear and the ecosystem collapses.
In the early stages of the development of private ownership, social resources are quite abundant. When everyone has a similar starting point, it greatly promotes the development of productivity. After all, more work brings more, and everyone will have a better tomorrow.
But when private ownership reaches the middle stage of development, big capital begins to have a size advantage. At this time, people with small capital or no capital have already felt the pressure of big capital.
For example, Coca-Cola can rely on its size advantage to lower costs, but any small factory that enters this field later will not be able to compete with Coca-Cola. In this way, as long as there are no sudden disasters or industrial changes, large companies are almost invincible. place. Not to mention that large companies can also kill small companies through disgusting price cuts. For example, in the early stages of development in fields such as Meituan and Didi, they lost money and burned money to clear the market, quickly enlarging the pie and establishing their monopoly status.
But at this stage, generally speaking, everyone is competing, but the food looks good, and resources are not as abundant as before, but everyone is still full. But in the later stages, resources were insufficient. The eating scene of big capital is not good, because there are not enough small fish to eat, and the big fish have no choice but to attack each other.
For another example, in the early days of most feudal dynasties, due to the war, the country's population was significantly reduced compared to the previous dynasty. At this time, both the landlord class and the common people had their own land types. However, in the process of development, landowners will use various means to extort money.
In good situations, such as in the face of natural disasters, since landlords are much more resistant to risks than ordinary people, many people will sell their land to landlords at low prices in exchange for a chance to survive.
In bad cases, such as colluding with the government through fraud, intimidation, forced buying and selling, etc.
Generally speaking, no matter which method is used, the final result is the same. The land in the hands of the common people is getting less and less, and the land in the hands of the landlords is getting more and more. In the end, the big landowners will form a strong force that can resist the imperial power. The people can be exploited, and then there is a disaster year, and the people can no longer survive, so they have no choice but to rebel, or the emperor feels that there is not enough money and wants to centralize power, and then the local warlords rebel. Of course, more often than not, the two situations are mixed together.
The final result was that an old dynasty collapsed, and the people experienced a dark age for more than a hundred years, waiting for the coming of the next dynasty, and the cycle started over and over again. This is the so-called law of historical cycles.
As long as private ownership does not change, the Matthew Effect will always exist. Many people think that there are good people among capitalists or landlords. This is true, but the need to overthrow capitalism or private ownership is not because of the moral problems of capitalists, but because of the mechanism of capitalism. .
Just like Zhang Mazi said to Huang Silang,
"Not having you is the most important thing to me."
Whether you are good or bad is not the important point. It is just that it is relatively easy for good landlords or capitalists to change their minds, unlike bad landlords and capitalists who have stubborn ideas.
The second hurdle is that capitalism or private ownership does not take production as its fundamental purpose.
Before talking about this, we must first know that there are only two ways to grow personal wealth, creation and transfer.
Creation is production, that is, everyone works together to make the cake bigger. For example, in primitive society, everyone could only pick peaches to eat, but in agricultural society, everyone learned to grow peaches to eat, so human society has developed by leaps and bounds.
To transfer is to seize, and it can be taken reasonably or violently. For example, profit from the price difference through trade is reasonable seizure, and plunder through war is violent seizure. In general, the method of wealth transfer is always a zero-sum game. Some people have more property, while others have less property, and conflicts arise.
Therefore, in order to achieve harmonious development of society, we must develop more production and less transfer of wealth.
Back to capitalism, its fundamental purpose is to achieve capital appreciation, which is the Matthew effect. As long as capital appreciation can be achieved, it doesn’t matter what your means are. Therefore, in the early days of capitalism, capitalists were keen on production, because the total amount of social wealth at this time was not high. Only by developing production can we accumulate our own wealth as quickly as possible. This is also what everyone likes to say, "the first pot of gold." ".
But when capital accumulates to a certain level, capital begins to use its brains because production itself is slow and tiring, so finance was born. The most common ones are banks and various loans. For example, I lend you money and then charge a certain amount of interest. When the amount of capital is small, the power of interest has not yet been demonstrated, but when the capital is large, interest can achieve an achievement of "financial freedom." For example, when you have hundreds of millions, you can earn tens of thousands every day while lying down, but you are not engaged in any production and do not contribute to the increase of social wealth. Of course, bank interest does not directly create an increase in social wealth, but it will still create it indirectly, because your loan may have helped other companies engaged in production, and they have created an increase in social wealth, and you have only collected some profits.
However, this "interest" comes in various forms, and other forms may not be so "reasonable". For example, if you have 10 apartments in a big city, you can collect tens of thousands of rent every month without doing anything, and a doctoral student may only earn this amount every month. Isn't this magical? From a certain point of view, the position of landlord is equivalent to that of a dog keeper.
So the magic of capital is revealed at this time. You do nothing every day, but the wealth you get can be comparable to that of a high-level talent. If it were me, I would also want to lie down like this. But there are no quiet years. It's just that someone is carrying the weight for you. Behind you, there are countless workers who have paid the price of their blood and sweat.
After people have tasted the sweetness of "financial freedom", it is difficult to go back to the hard work of coolies. Therefore, the country has been trying to make money flow back to the manufacturing industry for so many years, but with little effect. Not in real estate, but also in Bitcoin. , and the stock market. It is impossible to work anyway, and it is impossible to work again in this life.
