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Capitalism Hurting Poor People? I Am Shocked! SHOCKED.

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | April 8, 2019 |

By Emily Cutler | Last Week Tonight | April 8, 2019 |


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Oh, hi! How’s your Monday? Enjoying the brutal mixture of decent weather and still-full-on-snow that is early spring? Still trying to determine which famous white man we need to fix the nation for us? Great! Here’s the thing: Capitalism is an inherently predatory racket designed to make rich people richer at the expense of poor people!

That is going to come as a shock to more than a few people. Because we’ve all be taught that capitalism is the fairest system in the modern world, the best way for buyer and seller to meet in an even market place, and god’s way of determining who is smart and who is poor. And the thing is, all of those things might be true, but capitalism is still a predatory racket designed to enrich the, well, rich.

Let’s start with this.

Now plenty of people will object to the fact that one industry experiencing growing pains as investors begin pouring money into the market isn’t the same as capitalism being a predatory racket (which it super is). To those folks I’d say, you might want to take a second look at the 7:30 mark. The entire joke there is that no one involved in a business venture is going to do anything unless it makes them money. Enriching the lives of their not-well-off-customers doesn’t make the Carlyle Group any money. What does is bleeding those sad sacks dry because previously wealthy investors thought it beneath them to associate with “poors” in “non-wealth parks.” What they didn’t realize is that you don’t have to associate with poors in order to take money from them. You just have to use your money and power to instruct other people to associate with them, and take their money. And maybe tell them to sell their bodily fluids if they don’t have enough money to give.

And before anyone jumps into the comments to complain about how businesses aren’t responsible for safeguarding the livelihoods and living conditions of their customers, you’re totally right. It isn’t the businesses’ job. It’s the government’s job. Only the government can’t do it because we’re a capitalist country. So in effect, they are actually doing it by shirking the responsibilities laid out in the very definition of capitalism that so many people like to cite without considering any of the ramifications of those beliefs. Like the fact that currently the “untapped market” represented by mobile home parks isn’t the possibility of creating a better and cheaper mobile home in order to attract a larger customer base, but to steadily increase rents on the homes until all current residents have been priced out of their units, and then selling the abandoned land to a real estate developer for a new mall or something.

Of course, that does ignore the fact that some mobile home residents and non-profits are fighting back in order to create safeguards for mobile home-owners in order to combat their own fleecing. So there are ways that the people impacted by the predatory sales can band together in order to protect themselves from additional harm. Although they already have considerably less than those they’re fighting back against, they can pool resources in order to keep everyone safer. Until capitalists opt to move in again in order to pick off what they can from the herd. You know, like predators.

What I just need to remind myself of is that markets take care of themselves. I mean, sure, the new interest in exploiting those with fewer resources in a generally mocked social setting might lead to more of those people experiencing greater levels of poverty and homelessness. But don’t worry, because those people will be dead soon. Problem solved.



Header Image Source: HBO