this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
661 points (99.1% liked)

Work Reform

17419 readers
1651 users here now

A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.

Our Philosophies:

Our Goals

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] naught101@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's definitely not the financial infrastructure. It's just sucking wealth from elsewhere.

[โ€“] roguetrick@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Depends on what you mean by economy and financial infrastructure but in the West you're mostly right. Since globally we're a market economy dependent on trade, you'd still need financial infrastructure no matter what, even if you're talking about building loans for starting co-ops or whatever. That doesn't mean you have to allow capital accumulation to run wild. But the West is built around rent seeking and largely increasing asset pricing. Hell if property values go down and people aren't able to extract rents from the productive economy most Western nations view that as an economic crisis. They'll quickly sacrifice employment to prevent that. That's why it's so attractive to park capital in Western real estate and other nonproductive "capital". At least until the parasite grows so large that, whoops the economy can't run anymore. As it stands there's a homeostatic mechanism that allows this rent seeking to exist while also essentially forcing some of the productive capital to be funded to see enough returns to also grow to a degree. They call this hedging. But even in those cases they're largely investing in things that create financial moats like AI is proposed to be though extremely expensive infrastructure or through consolidaton and regulatorh capture like what's happening in US healthcare vs investing in capital that will compete in a commodity market.