this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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Let's say you have a cow. The cow had a baby, and it's producing milk, but more than the calf or your family need. So you start selling the excess milk.
It's good money! Soon you buy another cow, and another. Eventually you can't take care of them all, so you hire people to help you. Yay!
After a while you realize that waiting for the cows to be impregnated by your bull means they are not producing milk as much as they can. So you start forcefully impregnating the cows so they are always pregnant or producing milk.
The calves are drinking a lot of your milk, so you decide to kill them as soon as possible. You don't know what to do with the dead calves, so you start marketing them as "veal", a delicacy!
A lot of your process is still manual, so you buy machinery that increases your productivity by 100x. You're still paying your workers the same amount, even though they're now responsible for producing 100x more.
One day you realize there's too much milk in the market. If you sell it all, the price will drop too much. So you dump thousands of gallons of milk in the river, to keep the prices stable. You couldn't give them away to people in need, that would still affect the market!
You're still not selling enough (though you have more money that you could spend in your lifetime). So you buy some politicians so the government says that milk is essential, the only way to absorb calcium, and it should be in every school. People are convinced they need milk, even though it's from another species and even though humans don't need milk after a couple years of age.
That's why I hate capitalism.
So capitalism is bad because it's extremely efficient?
Even if a process is efficient, which in this case it isn't (overproduction is terrible for efficiency), that's not the only thing to consider, the moral aspect is important too. Off the top of my head, in this example, there's the inhumane treatment of the cows, the workers get paid inadequately for what they produce, and the dumped excess produce probably affects the ecosystem.