this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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Late Stage Capitalism
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Ownership is capital. The definition of capitalism is leveraging ownership for profit. When people own things, they are competition. You can avoid purchasing their goods or services, devalue their goods or services by offering your own at a reasonable price, or kick them out of the market entirely. A sale for them now could always turn into a lost sale later when you resale your property to someone else. A company wanting to buy that property from you will have to spend more to pay you enough profit to make it worth it for you to sale. If you leverage equipment to provide a service and a livelihood, they compete with you day after day and get no piece of that pie.
But what if you had to pay a license to use that equipment? Or you had to go to them to get it fixed? Or you only rented that property in the first place. They could start taking a cut of your profits for themselves.
What if you couldn't afford to own essentials like a home or your transportation. What if you had to lease to meet your essential needs. What if the pool of property owners was so small and so overwhelmingly made up of mega corporation that have the resources to outbid every prospective home buyer and turn that property into a rental, or better yet, a hotel room through air bnb where the resnt pays for even a massively inflated buying price in a matter of months? What if in paying over asking repeatedly, you artificially inflate the value of your own properties and those around them making homes even less affordable for non-corporate entities, and make your competition pool even smaller. Now you and you alone can buy more homes and have more streams of rental money to fund more purchasing. Meanwhile it is taking 2+ adult incomes to make your rent prices, which rise every time you artificially raise property values by over spending on new properties in a massive feedback loop until people are spending every spare dollar on a basic necessity that barely meets their needs anymore.
They feed on dependency, forcing out competition, injecting themselves between you and your livelihood, and maximally extracting every single ounce of resources they can from you. Yay capitalism.