Predatory Capitalism in the Modern Age of the USA

As most people who read these pages have probably gathered by now, I was born and grew up in Europe. I came to the USA in 1981 to go to college and I ended up getting married and settling down in this country.

A good part of my reason for coming to the USA had to do with it being a place I perceived to have more opportunities than my native Denmark.

Now I should clarify that. I was always interested in starting my own business and I was aware that I was going to be in a very narrow niche field. At the time — early 1980s — such a thing as "starting your own business" in Denmark was not only a pretty complex thing but because the country was fairly small it was not likely to succeed if you very only catering to a very small niche market.

In the United States, on the other hand, with over 300 million in population you could do something highly specialized and still have enough of a market where you could potentially make a living.

So you could argue that I came to the United States as part of the so-called "American Dream."

However, let us fast forward some 40+ years... and I have to admit that the American Dream has really been nothing like what I thought it was going to be.

What I have learned — mostly through personal experience, but also from watching others — is that the type of capitalism that exists and actually operates in the US is very "predatory" in nature, and not at all the image I had when I first came here, nor the image that is still purveyed as "the land of opportunity" in many parts of Europe.

That image amounts to the idea that if somebody who goes to a town and they start a business and they work hard, after a while they can become fairly successful and can buy a nice house and cars and send their kids to college and stuff like that.

The truth is that it is almost impossible to succeed like that. In fact, just from talking to my relatives in Denmark and looking at my own and my friends experiences in the US, I would have to say that these days you have a better chance of succeeding in Denmark than in the US.

As business is conducted in the modern United States, we really operate under something I can only call "predatory capitalism."

It is based not so much based purely on succeeding on merit, but often on taking pains to actively destroy your competitors. It is based on an eternal growth metric. It is based on a system where corporations have "person status" and the profits from working hard and up in the hands of some mystical "investor class" rather than in the hands of the people who did the hard work and caused the profits to happen, in the first place.

The individual entrepreneur is less likely to be cheered on for their initiative than to be seen as a target either to be bought out or be pushed out of the marketplace.

Meanwhile part of what makes this system so destructive is that it is predicated on eternal growth. That is, the entire system depends on constant growth for its very survival.

I remember during a recent economic downturn, the government started to be totally horrified by the idea that there might be deflation and that the gross national product might actually shrink. Economists were wringing their hands but if you actually looked at this from a functional level if there is simply less money being spent so we don't need more stuff do we? And ultimately given how much we already have, is anybody truly going to suffer hardship by having 2% less of something next year?

The reason I call this system "predatory" is that it tends to pull out the small operator in favor of huge economies of scale.

The whole notion of somebody starting a store and becoming successful with it in their hometown is a thing that is long gone, largely replaced by mega box stores that carry nameless brands from foreign countries. Land of opportunity? Not so much.

Of course you can still start your own business and make a go of it, but the landscape is quite different from the image that is sold as the "Land of Opportunity."

For a while, I worked for a Fortune-100 IT company. In an odd twist of events, I actually knew its founder while I was at University although we chose very different paths (he dropped out) in life.

The point, though, is that while I was working there it was quite clear that making a good product took back seat to keeping investors happy.

It was an eye opener in the sense that it taught me that entrepreneurship was somewhat out of alignment with my values.

In spite of this, I continued forward as a self-employed person, even though I on several occasions encountered this "thing" of having colleagues/competitors who seemed very set on making my business look bad, rather than just focusing on excelling with their own.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of free markets and such... but not the (lack of) ethics many operate with. If your success is predicated on the failure of others and you materially seek to bring about that failure, then you're a predator, not an entrepreneur!

Of course, that's just my opinion...

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great Friday!

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Created at 2024-07-11 23:49 PDT
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