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Are economics the next scourge?
PSometimes I wonder if mankind has created, through economics and finance, its own golem.
For centuries, companies have become legal bodies. As such, they have interests and rights, which often conflict to those of natural persons, i.e. citizens. Moreover, they have unrestricted lifespan, which is an immeasurable advantage over any natural person.
The larger a company is, the more independent it becomes from the people who are supposed to run it, and the more it acts in its own interest. However, the interests of a company can be summed up in a single word: profit. Everything else is just a means. And for lack of morality, since morality is a human value, all means are fine.
The power of major corporations over States is well established. Institutional lobbying, blackmail to relocate operations in a globalized market, revolving doors, etc. The result is measured in political speeches that are tinged with notions such as “competitiveness”, “attractiveness”, “performance”, “efficiency”, not to mention the main one: “growth”. We have to wonder where the human being, the citizen that a government is supposed to represent, has disappeared. We must recognize that companies are performing well. So much so that over time they have ended up concentrating immense wealth, and that they have often done so to the detriment of the populations, who in a way have become its minions.
For some time I hoped that the macro-economy would come to the rescue for a simple reason: for the economy to live, it needs consumers, so it is necessary to redistribute a minimum amount of wealth so that humans can live.
It seems that I was wrong, because notorious counter-examples show that without regulation the market focuses only on those who can afford to consume. Alongside luxury stores, those who do not produce nor consume die because they are useless to the economy.
In history, humanity has been periodically decimated by various scourges: world wars, epidemics, famines. In recent decades, despite local conflicts, mortality has decreased worldwide. At a time when some fear a predicted global overpopulation, I wonder if economics and finance are not the next scourge that will decimate the weakest billions.
Unless humanity finds a cure in time.
Insofar as personal data is becoming a major economic issue (big data), where in a few years companies have become global giants by leveraging it, allowing through PeerStorage the development of alternative “free” services could contribute to this cure.