The perils of Capitalism in America
As we know, the founding principle of the modern world is Capitalism. If you think through the logical consequences of this, all the depredations of the current system seem to make sense. The structural motive in capitalism to seek profit regardless of social or environmental cost encourages scams and corruption of the market. Corruption is the norm if you can get away with it in the system, it's encouraged structurally. The legal system having some countermeasures that are supposed to prevent too much corruption. Like those Anti-Trust laws that seem to never get invoked anymore as these few giant corporations dominate everything, which happens to also include owning all the congressmen. A couple of points:
1. Under Capitalism, you would expect a transition from nationalism to imperialism to globalism. First you have to build up an industrial base with clustered factories, supply chains, transport hubs etc. and bring goods to it, so you get nationalism. Then at some point it becomes profitable to capture primary resources and/or use your own people to extract them, so you get imperialism. Then it becomes profitable to cut costs by relocating production centers to the cheapest locations possible and moving customers and workers where you want them, so you get globalism.
2. Capitalists would see the founding of colonies in places like America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa etc. as sending workers out to do the job of opening up mines and such, something like large construction projects. Individuals in those colonies probably thought of themselves as pioneer staking out a future for their families in a new world etc. but that was never the official position. They are seen as temporary help and like any temporary help, when the project they are working on is finished you get rid of them and replace them with different workers hired to manage the finished site.
3. The next step after that is it becomes more profitable for these multi-national corporations to employ machines than workers on an individual basis, they are more effective at the job and more cost efficient. But on the broad scale, this is doomed to fail, as it just pushes more workers out of the work force and when done by many separate corporations creates enough unemployment that there aren't enough consumers able to buy the goods to maintain cyclical consumption. If the consumers don't keep buying in every new product cycle at a high enough rate to maintain profit then the Capitalist system fails. And individual companies might sometimes have little choice but to automate to keep up with competition and get the cost efficiency necessary for short term profit. The bottom line is capitalism is essentially doomed and not very sustainable when the core motives it produces for companies and heads of those companies contrast with their long term sustainability. Increased automation is just a continuation of the same principle that leads companies to outsource for cheap labor overseas.
Summary
In capitalism, the motive is always to get as much money as you can, even if you're making people pay 10x what they really should. Corruption is encouraged by the competitive motive of capitalism. Whether it's banking scams, or cutting corners on product safety to increase profit margins, this is all just a pursuit of the profit motive. Common decency would make most people think those things are wrong but it is discouraged by the system and undermined. Capitalism profits off of social issues being perpetuated and not fixed since that maintains needs so people keep cyclically buying products from the corporations. Competition and capitalism will always tend towards monopolies and oligopolies, they serve the goal of defeating competition and gaining profit, so it's no big surprise that big businesses over and over again try to establish these oligopolies and monopolies.
An even playing field is fundamentally against the goals of individual competing big businesses who want to maximize their profit and consolidate their power for further profits. So they will do what they can to make it unfair.
