Hello dear Comrades, I have a question that's haunting my mind for the last couple of weeks. I'm gonna try to keep it short: why do the elites/oligarchs/big capitalists (so not the petty bourgeois) keep doing everything that they do (i.e. both financial games and trickeries and unspeakable atrocities) in order to accumulate even more wealth?
Let's make a thought experiment: if a family has 50 million dollars, and let's say half are immobilized in villas and yachts, while half are invested "productively", the family could afford to maintain their lifestyle thanks to passive income/rents without lifting a finger. So what compels them to work hard (not productively, but still hard) to ammass ever more money? Surely it's easier to sit in a pool all day and collect tithes rather than strategizing about the new merger, the new apartment block to buy, the next politician to bribe ecc.
This thought experiment gets even more absurd when we get to billionaires, they could literally afford everything on earth and yet we see ghouls like elon musk spending all day manipulating the stock market/public sentiment on xitter, cutting the US government to pieces in DOGE or planning the next grift with his companies, couldn't he just sit back, relax and withdraw from public life? If I was him I would prefer to do so.
Is it some kind of mental disturbance like sociopathy? Are they part of a secret cabal? (Not unlikely considering the whole Epstein thing) do they just like seeing number go up?
Idk if all of this makes sense, it's just a rant after all ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It is because of the Liberal ideology by Adam Smith in his book called "The Wealth of Nations". Adam Smith claimed that maximal profit is good because it could only be achieved through mutual cooperation with mutual interest. He neglected that reality that deception and unequal market power ensure that a person can maximize profit at the cost of other people. The belief that private firms are all about maximal profit is also flawed since a person could not possibly know how to maximize profit over the long term due to the complex interaction between many factors. Private firms might need to depend more on connections, social relationships, and reputation for their success. They might depend on traditional norms, values, and beliefs to address lack uncertainty to maximize profit. A business manager can be like academic professors, doctors, and public officers in their morality.
Can you explain what you mean by this?