Like at some point won’t all of the profit be squeezed out of society?
Technically, money is just a number on a ledger. Practically, there’s a finite amount of wealth in the solar system, much less on earth, significantly less accessible to humans and only a slim amount can be taken from the working class before people start starving. We already have little enough that the population is going to start contracting.
Numbers in ledgers is a description of banking but money and banking are not the same thing.
Alternatively you could be describing money management, keeping a ledger of an account. Money management is the management of money but it is not money itself.
A collection of coins or bills is worth a certain amount and when you add or remove money the amount changes but you do not need to update any accounts.
I’m making a distinction between money as a system of abstracting wealth and what wealth practically means. You’re making a highly disputable philosophical argument about the ontological nature of money instead of engaging with the germaine ideas. Simply put: I don’t consider a physical representation of money to be money in-and-of-itself; I consider each bill to be a part of a grand fragmented ledger. Furthermore, bitcoin is literally a public ledger for which there is no physical exchange of any representation of money. As a final example, the Yap isles famously have a monetary system that has physical Incarnations but no physical exchange among the people of the isles. It’s literally just a public ledger that exists in the minds of those who use it.
Well I’d say it’s when the proletariat revolts, destroying the machine of exploitation, at which gathering further profit is impossible.
No. Or at least not while inflation exists.
Inflation or deflation always exist. The question is to what degree. I would revisit your understanding of this topic if possible.
Inflation and deflation are mutually exclusive they can’t both exist at the same time.
That’s not the point of inflation.
Our economy needs inflation to discourage saving and incentive investing.
If there was no inflation and 3% interest on savings, that’s all people would do.
So they make inflation more, and people lose purchasing power in a savings account, and instead invest, which pumps up stock prices for the whales who knows when to cash out.
On a smaller level it incentives people to spend as soon as they get it, because next year a $100 is worth less, so they spend while it’s worth more.
It’s a house of cards and when the wealthy owns the government there’s no one to hit the brakes on profits before the economy crashes and burns.
So they make inflation more, and people lose purchasing power in a savings account, and instead invest, which pumps up stock prices for the whales who knows when to cash out.
That’s… not really how that works. I mean inflation is there to keep people from saving when they could be investing their money, but that’s not to make money for the whales. Money sitting in a bank account doing nothing is bad (economically speaking) even when the owner of the money isn’t rich. More money moving is better for everyone.
More money moving is better for everyone.
*Gestures broadly at “the economy” Biden kept bragging about
Lots of money is moving, it’s not good for the majority of us
There’s an actual limit to profit, they are called profit margins and different industries have different profit margins.
One way historic economic systems prevented total market capture by family dynasties was large families.
A big family dividing a concern will eventually sell it, break it up so it can be split.
With smaller families this division will take much longer, and with corporate personhood we are in a new weird self perpetual bureaucratic regimen
There’s a limit with any particular set of tools and labor, but a universal limit doesn’t exist, no. Profit comes when you take money and use it in a more productive way than letting it sit under your mattress, and there’s no theoretical limit on productivity.
