No Stupid Questions

The rich don’t care about money, they care about capital. They want to own every house, automobile, factory, and natural resources. Money is a very temporary store of value so more assets can be purchased.

There isn't an endgame.

I read a short story years ago about just this. Quite an interesting read if anyone is interested.

It's probably something like the story within the story For the Benefit of Mankind by Liu Cixin.

Then the Reaganomics kick in

In the theoretical endgame employment is reduced to where there aren't enough people with money to be customers. There's a wave of consolidation as businesses with lots of cash buy failing ones, further concentrating wealth. Eventually the impoverished public gets desperate enough to riot and steal what they need, outnumbering law enforcement. The system no longer has the resources to protect itself, and we physically demolish our society. Then there's a reset back to a time of bartering.

You're supposed to recognize their undisputed superiority and turn yourselves into automatons for their pleasure, having no other options available to you.

Of course that never actually works, as it always ends up with someone like Moses or Jesus figuring out that you can, in fact, live perfectly fine in this world without their economic systems. As long as you're willing to deal with the natural world directly.

They'll just keep screwing each other over until either one person owns everything, or we're smushed into the mud of conflict.

Slavery for us, power for them. That’s it. We get nothing, they get everything.

I think the ultra wealthy and powerful understand that revolution becomes more likely as the majority's material conditions declines, so their endgame is to throw just enough crumbs to the majority so that they don't want to risk losing those crumbs. Many of today's ultra wealthy and powerful seem exceptionally out of touch with reality and dumb though, so idk. Some are accelerationists (i.e. e/acc), and purposely avoid taking into account possible negative consequences.

I don't think we will get to that level. It doesn't make sense financially. I mean sure, replace people with robots will happen but it's a long way from happening right now.

"Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy

They never will. But they’ll likely always have most of it. The government will print money just enough to keep inflation low-ish but allow people to feel comfortable enough to spend it. Big corps will eventually accumulate them and hoard it.

This is a good, nutshell explanation of late-stage capitalism.

As far as the answer to "what's the endgame", I do not know. I suspect that many or most of these rich folks are so moneyblind that they don't know either. Or, they simply don't believe that their collective actions will eventually cause the system to fail.

But most likely, I think, is that they believe someone else will bear the majority of any negative impact. Of course this makes less sense in the face of a systematic collapse, but again: it's probably very difficult to see when you have dollar signs in your eyes.

The world is not a zero sum game. that alone defeats your premis-

Hasn’t that endgame been pretty much reached?

guillotines

It's like a Dark Souls game. Many of the bosses are tough, but the final boss is just some guy and is rather easy to cheese with parries. The mobs you have to fight to reach the final boss are harder than the boss itself.

Automation.

For a while it will be that they only have almost all of the money; a small portion will have to go to the workers so that someone exists to run things like power plants and farms and mcdonalds and shit. But eventually robots will replace all that, or slavery