Us

I would like to explain the inner mechanics of Capitalism, as there are still a great many people who have not quite figured it out yet.

For the purposes of ease of explanation, I will use as an example the childcare services, and a hypothetical corporation by the name of Tears R Us. Some number of years ago, a pioneering young soul decided to devote their life to helping young kids with developmental problems. So they registered their business with the government, filled out the necessary trademarks and patents, and voila: Tears R Us was born.

Now, after some number of years, the CEO realizes two things. First, it is difficult to make an honest living in the cutthroat world of the free market. Parents can only afford to pay them $200 per child per day to shelter their broken youth. The company spends $100 worth of that per day on actual care, and earns only $100 in profit after all is said and done.

The second thing they realize is that Uncle Sam is totally and completely loaded. With trillions of dollars in yearly tax revenue, and the ability to spend many times that amount in deficit spending, the government commands the greatest concentration of wealth ever witnessed in the history of humankind.

So Tears R Us decides to change their business plan. Instead of taking $100 per child in profit, they decide to spend it on lobbying: in essence, bribing corrupt government officials into writing legislation giving them $1000 per child per day in subsidies. Think of the children, right?

They quickly realize that they’ve hit the jackpot. Investing the equivalent of $100 per child per day in securing corporate welfare from their favorite Uncle has generated a 10-fold return on investment, the vast majority of which goes to their CEO and to their shareholders. And they still need only spend a measly $100 of that on each child per day.

Of course, with such an arrangement, human souls are each worth an elephant’s weight in gold, and the more poor wretches they siphon through their bureaucracy, the more money they make. Before long, kids are packed into their facilities like sardines, and are worse off under their tender care than they ever would have been with the broken families they were cast out of.

And that, my friends, is capitalism in a nutshell. The corporation wins. The government, which is desperately obsessed with job creation, also wins. The only true losers are the poor victims, who have effectively been enslaved by the system, and the taxpayers, whose wealth is slowly being juiced like a lemon.

But that isn’t the end of it. Any children who graduate from hell academy will be almost permanently traumatized by their experience. And it will be the job of the doctors, nurses, and social workers of the world to fix them, or failing that, to leave them more or less functional. So in essence, as in the early days of the Chinese Communist Party, half of the population is being payed to dig holes, and the other half is being payed to fill them in. Except the holes are being dug through living, breathing human beings, instead of harmless piles of dirt by the side of the road. But hey, jobs, jobs, jobs, right?