I’d say it’s more like disguised feudalism. We’re all peasants for the few kings and queens that have all the money at the top.
If anything this understates the problem.
It fundamentally is NOT a pyramid scheme. In a pyramid scheme there is no actual product or service of value and simply extracts wealth from the people in lower tiers. Value, or wealth, is simply the byproduct of an equitable transaction between two or more parties.
To all the people here ranting about monetary debt: its not an issue. Money isn’t designed to hold value in the long term. It’s a feature, not a bug.
It’s just really unfortunate for those who play the game as if money were an asset. It’s meant for transactions, not for storage.
Honestly one of the reasons I fell for a pyramid scheme coming out of high school.
A friend invited me and I went to shit on it and get him out, but the main guy’s whole thing was “everything is a pyramid scheme, at least here you have the chance to build a pyramid beneath you.”
Obviously there were other reasons as old as time, but the argument of “so what, your ‘regular job’ is already a pyramid scheme you can’t win” was pretty rattling to a teenager in 2011.
Some retirement saving schemes may be a pyramid scheme. When the population growth stagnates, there will not be enough young people to produce for everyone.
No, it is not. It is brutal in many ways. But that it is not. Neither is socialomswor communism.
Pyramid schemes are zero-sum. I steal and gain, you lose. Capitalism and even communism are not zero-sum games. They are net-positive. They involve people making goods and services for others.
I think you can say is a pyramid scheme in the way you can’t really make money if you aren’t making money for someone upper on the ladder, even if are an independent business owner, you still have loans to pay or equipment that is sold by a corporation.
Generally the idea is that both parties need to benefit from any transaction if it is voluntary.
When you have to eat and the means to feed ourselves is held by few, no transaction is voluntary.
Of course it’s voluntary. You choose what you buy, when you do it, how much and from whom.
If someone held you on gunpoint and told you to buy their product, that would be involuntary.
You can choose what, when, how much, and from whom, but you are still are still forced to do so. Choosing which person puts me at gunpoint doesn’t make it voluntary
You can also feed yourself by growing food or hunting. Neither of those are banned, just more inconvenient and you probably have some other skills to sell and buy food instead
I can only do so on land that I purchased. Or on someone else’s land I purchased the right to do so on
Generally speaking, slavery is also benefitial to both parties, you’re either a slave out you get killed. While technically voluntary (because a slave can still choose stand up to the oppressor, even if it’s guaranteed to fail) we don’t consider slavery voluntary. We can say that in this day and age our work is voluntary, but it’s debatable.
You can look to this year how “voluntary” it is when the Hollywood execs literally said they will wait for the protesters to starve so they’d get back to work. When there’s such a severe power dynamic it becomes almost no different to slavery, because you, individually, can be effectively forced back to work. The only reason Hollywood protests have any chance to have impact is because they collectively oppose the oppression. The power dynamic is being balanced (or dipped in the favor of labor) by sheer number of protestors / workers.
Capitalism is a scheme where finite raw materials are being extracted and where finite nature is being destroyed - both on the planetary scale; once we reach the end, it will be the end.
Yes, but you’re going to find the same thing with Communism.
Too many shitty greedy people at the top, too many plebs with fuck all at the bottom.
And while you may be thinking “I could live on a commune, spend an hour a day growing our own food and have all that time left for whatever else I want”, you’ll quickly find you can’t grow your own 65" OLED television or whatever other comforts you’ve become accustomed to.
The billionaires need reining in, and better distribution of wealth all around the bottom, but capitalism ain’t going anywhere.
Atleast it works unlike covert fascist ideas like Marxism/Communism
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