Another way of saying it is that some things are so expensive you don’t do them even if they could be useful one day. Don’t have a second house? Your first one could burn down. You don’t? I guess you must be a greedy capitalist thinking only about short term money.
Comment on Why the world doesn't have a backup plan for the oil crisis?
Mannimarco@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Because being prepared for something that might happen isn’t profitable in the short term
scarabic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yep.
If capitalism is calling the shots, then no one plans more than a fiscal quarter ahead of time.
You can’t compete against someone that just ignores all risks, because if nothing goes wrong they put you out of business.
And by the time something goes wrong, they have enough wealth and connections to get bailed out by governments.
Because of that, every society that places capitalism above all else, will eventually implode. One day there just won’t be anything to bail them out with.
It make sense for the oligarchs to keep making bets they can’t lose, but it means everyone else is forced to take bets we cant win.
blarghly@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is literally just religious nut end-times doomerism.
Also, your explaination literally doesn’t apply in this situation, since the people most impacted by the blockade are the petro-states of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, and Iraq. With the exception of Iraq, all of these countries are monarchies, with the royal families having significant control over oil production and benefitting from its profits. These are not publicly traded corporations with CEOs only concerned about next quarter’s bonus. They aren’t even socialist technocrats given a mandate to do what is best for the good of the people now and in the future. They are individuals who will be directly impacted by this blockade, who are looking not only to the benefit of oil weath in their own lives, but in the lives of their families far into the future. If anyone would have an incentive to take the long view, it would be petro-state monarchs who are, I must point out, not capitalists.
So, no, this is not an example of the failures of capitalism. The far more obvious rationale is that (1) the future is hard to predict and (2) people are bad at planning.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well this is rich people being unaccountable to anything but foreign military realities. This is the union of corporate capitalism and a two tiered justice system which are both things that go hand in hand.