... or more accurately the fall in population growth.

Shareholders in corporations demand rising dividends and share prices. When the population stops growing, or even starts falling as in some European countries the only way to satisfy shareholders is by raising prices yearly.

This is the weakness of capitalism. It only thrives in times of high population growth.

This is particularly true for public utilities which have no way to grow their revenue other than by raising prices.

Even in the situation of Capitalistic cannibalism where companies consume other companies' market share to grow their revenue, there is no winner in the long run. It's a zero-sum game in the era of low or no population growth.

Elon Musk has seen this as a constraint and has decried the lack of population growth despite his stated commitment to sending people off-planet.

I have not read the economic works of Karl Marx (only the early works on censorship of the Prussian state).

But in the presentation of those who read his, the problem of capitalism is that the capitalist must maximize his profits by minimizing the wages of his workers and employees.

But if their salaries are minimal, then they cannot buy your goods and therefore capitalism is forced to move from one crisis of overproduction of goods to another crisis of overproduction of goods. And automation and robotization of the production process only exacerbates this crisis.

They say that in the 20th century, Western economists found a way to delay a crisis of this kind in order to grow the middle class by giving them loans.

But a loan is money taken for today from the future. (Therefore, almost all Westerners are in credit dependence.)  But a loan from the future is limited by the amount that you are able to earn in your entire life.

Now imagine yourself as the head of a bank. You have reached the point where all layers of society that are capable of repaying loans have been exhausted, when all other layers have already taken out loans that they will repay throughout their lives. What should you do? Now any loan you issue will not be returned to you.

At this point, you either destroy your banking system, or you don't give more loans and your people can't buy manufactured goods. They say this moment came in 2008.

But at that moment, the citadel of world capitalism, the United States, still had the resources to defend itself against it. They had unsecured dollars of the global dollar system through which all countries of the world traded among themselves, and the United States received the resources of other countries for these unsecured dollars.

At this point, the United States faced the question of how to maintain its mega-consumption system and it turned out that the world has: 1) weak countries poorly adapted to resistance; 2) strong countries capable of resistance; 3) vassal countries and allies.

The strategy is clear enough, I suppose.
Weak countries should continue to be robbed, but the problem is that they are usually poor.

Strong countries should be brought to submission by force, and ideally destroyed and made by a multitude of small weak countries. But this is a complicated and slow process.

It's not good, of course, to rob allies, but when it comes to your own survival... In addition, these allies are the richest countries and they have a very strong American influence. They are the most profitable and easiest to rob.

So, more than 15 years have passed since the first blow of the crisis.
And what do we see?
I can't tell you anything about weak countries. It is necessary to carry out an impressive selection of a large number of countries and show how their standard of living has changed over the years.

As for the strong recalcitrant countries, Russia has already been attacked through Ukraine and NATO.
AUKUS is being prepared against China.
India has not been touched until recently, hoping to quarrel with China, but it seems that after Modi's recent visit (less than a month has passed) to Russia, it will finally come to India. (We can already see topics on this forum that the Indian government is very bad.)
Iran is being dragged into a war with Israel.

The richest allies of the United States in Europe, Germany and France, have been shamelessly robbed. Their governments are already barely holding on to power. And these governments will definitely not survive the next elections (if they are held democratically).

And now the United States is approaching the moment when the fat flow of resources becomes a thin trickle. Beggars are robbed, rich allies are robbed, and for the rest of the resources you have to fight with strong rivals.

It is precisely because the last opportunities to protect the US economy are disappearing that we see these insane convulsions in American politics.

I do not know what capitalism will be like after the crisis hits its unprotected heart in the citadel of its power. (I don't think there are ten people on earth right now who understand well what will happen after that.)

But without a doubt it will affect the whole world and especially those who supplied a lot of goods to the United States. Because they won't be able to buy them anymore.

However, I am not an economist and it is possible that all this is just my imagination.

Laugh till you cry wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2024 at 9:51am:


It's not that stunning to me.

This system has been built for decades.

Do you remember the independent policy of French President De Gaulle?

And now I see book with such annotation:
"Recently accessible, American secret archives shed new light on the fierce “struggle” which opposed the American administration to General de Gaulle for almost ten years. Resisting in many ways America's designs, seeking to supply France with atomic weapons by withdrawing from NATO, openly supporting Quebec's independence and being hostile to Washington's policies in Asia and Latin America, the founder of the Fifth Republic was for a long time (until the presidency of Richard Nixon) the "black beast" of the United States. Reading the notes, reports and confidential documents from the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon or the personal archives of American leaders, we can now appreciate the intensity and stubbornness of the efforts made, across the Atlantic, to fight this unpredictable and prestigious rival. A fight which never excluded a strange and lasting fascination.

The author of this book has analyzed and analyzed hundreds of declassified documents. As an investigative journalist, he chose to favor, in this incredible story, the most surprising episodes and the newest archive documents. There are few pages in this book that contain only one or more revelations."
Vincent Jauvert - L'Amérique contre de Gaulle : Histoire secrète, 1961-1969 (I took the annotation from the French Amazon.)

I think you are mistaken when you think that the United States supported Brexit.

As far as I remember, Obama spoke out against Britain leaving the EU.

And on the website where Boris Johnson's materials were collected, I saw an article where, addressing the United States, he justified the need for Brexit for Britain.

It is only indirectly related to capitalism. Both the wealth attributed to capitalism and the lower birth rates can be attributed to human rights, which tend to come as a package including the right of women to have control over their own bodies. A woman's right to decline sex for example is a fairly recent phenomena.

Despite this, capitalism has, via the wealth it creates, lead to a lengthy population boom that has continued for centuries and is completely off the charts compared to anything that came prior.

It is a package deal. You cannot have one without the other (eventually). If you give people democracy, they will choose freedom, including capitalism, which is essentially economic freedom.

Likewise, if you give people freedom, you will end up with democracy, which is why the CCP is crapping its pants. A capitalist dictatorship is inherently unstable.

Laugh till you cry wrote on Aug 5^th, 2024 at 6:15pm:


They are winning. As are Israeli Muslims. And Israeli Christians. And Israeli atheists. They have created a liberal democracy out of one of the most backwards and oppressive places on earth.

You really can't get past the fact that they are Jewish, can you? Were you mistreated by a Rabbi when you were a kid?