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Capital over Labour is Dangerous (Edit)

I have something to say.

I keep seeing an old pattern slip back into fashion: the worship of capital. Money—once a well-behaved servant—has been crowned an all-seeing, all-knowing god. We sing its praises, consult its oracles, and treat its fluctuations like commandments carved in stone. That’s capitalism gone sideways.

Capital was born a tool, not a deity

Picture a master mason in antiquity. He lifts a hammer, sets a stone, raises an arch. The hammer is silent until the mason’s skill brings it to life. Capital was meant to work exactly like that hammer: inert until labour—physical or intellectual—swings it with purpose.

Founders know this better than anyone. In the early days of a company, capital is a handful of shillings in a savings account, maybe a seed cheque from a daring aunt. What actually bends reality is the team pulling eighteen-hour days, debugging at 3 a.m., convincing the first customer to take a leap of faith. Labour is the make-or-break ingredient; money is just calories.

Then the hammer started worshipping itself

Somewhere along the rise of the modern American empire, a new trade emerged: people who work only in money. They don’t fund roads, they don’t invent vaccines, they don’t even manage factories. They re-forge capital like alchemists chasing more of the same glittering metal. When capital compounds inside its own echo chamber, claims on wealth balloon far faster than real goods and services.

Think of it this way: if it takes me one day to craft one pair of shoes, the price of those shoes—one “capital unit”—ought to rise only when I make better shoes or fewer people cobble. But if a hedge-fund algorithm flips the same dollar ten thousand times before lunch, suddenly the street price of leather sky-rockets while my wage barely twitches. The cobbler loses; the click-trade wins.

We’ve seen this movie—in costume after costume

The props change—scrolls, sesterces, rubles, or today’s triple-leveraged ETFs—but the script is painfully familiar.

Why the imbalance kills the spark

When the creator captures crumbs while the owner rakes cream, talent takes the hint. Why design a new engine, write a daring novel, or pioneer a cancer therapy if the upside is siphoned away? Civilisations that lean too hard on coerced or under-rewarded labour always get out-innovated by those that celebrate makers. That’s why empires fat on tribute fall to scrappy upstarts who still value sweat and ingenuity.

Spotting the warning lights

Economists dress it up, but the tell-tale is simple:

Right now the gauges are blinking red. Asset charts rocket while median wages limp behind. A tiny cadre arbitrages paper claims; everyone else juggles rent, school fees, and fuel.

So what do we do—short of smashing the machines?

  1. Tie capital back to creation. Equity for builders, fair royalty splits for artists, co-ops where staff own meaningful stakes.

  2. Tax churn like toil. If a day’s trading profit is taxed lighter than a day’s nursing, we’ve declared spreadsheets nobler than saving lives.

  3. Open the capital club. Let ordinary savers buy slices of productive assets, not just lottery tickets on inflated stocks.

  4. Celebrate craft again. Award prime-time glory to engineers, teachers, and farmers, not only to deal-makers ringing closing bells.

The closing note

Capital can raise cathedrals—but only when it stays in its place, a hammer in competent hands. When we let the hammer hypnotise us, it starts swinging wildly, smashing the very workshops that built it. Our challenge, then, is both humble and heroic: wrench the hammer back, honour the calloused palms that wield it, and get back to building things that matter.

That’s all I wanted to say—for now.

Capital over Labour is Dangerous (Original)

I have something to say.

I have noticed a trend in our society that has been happening for a long time and has happened many times before. It is the worship of capital.

Capital is seen as an all knowing, all seeing god that must be obeyed and respected. It is the religion of capitalism gone wrong.

There is problem with capital in theory and even based on its results. The problem is when capital is seen as more important as the labour that produced it.

Capital is nothing without the labour (both physical and intellectual) of the people who produced the capital and run it on a day to day. The labour is not necessary in the employees, but most importantly the founders who work day and night to make a dream become a reality. In fact, for an early-stage company, this is the most crucial make or break labour element of all.

There was only a time, or maybe in my own mind, that capital was subordinate to capital. Why? Because capital builds neither roads nor bridges, capitals nor governments, treats health nor grows food. Capital is simple a tool, like a hammer, that must be wielded by a skilled craftsman who knows a trade like construction, venture-building, nation-building, healthcare or agriculture. Capital was meant to be a tool to push the world forward in the way that you saw fit, with the skills you had.

However, as all great empires, the current one, the United States, has gone through a transition. It has been the advent of a new class of individual, who only trades in capital. When ones job becomes the working of capital like a metal or a software product, then you start to see the worship of capital as an all encompassing thing. Why is this so dangerous? Well, capital is a claim on your share of labour that produces goods and services. For every good or service that is produced by labour, there is ideally an equal amount in capital that is created. This means that if someone takes 1 day to produce 1 good, it should cost 1 capital unit, which we represent as currency.

However, when we have a class of people, who mold capital to produce more capital, without any solid base in goods or services produced, then we have a situation where there is more capital than there are goods or services. This means that these crony capitalists, who are essentially con-men in the capitalist system, can buy more goods and services without working any harder, but just "smarter" than everyone else. By trading, inflating prices and gambling, they relatively cheaply compared to everyone else. They game the system in a way that most people cannot comprehend or even have access to.

When such a system is glorified and even legitimised, we see a situation where goods and services can be bought at relatively low prices to this crony capitalists, which promotes price increases, which puts these goods and services further out of reach from many people. Since most people are either employed or self-employed, they have to work harder or raise their prices to keep up. However, how many people can keep up with such a system when a small segment of population is accumulating so much capital faster than everyone else. Sure, there will be some who will keep up but how many are those? Very few. The top 1% will. The next 9% will. The 20% probably will. The next 30% maybe. The 40% will struggle to keep and many will fall off.

When the labour that produces goods and services cannot keep up with capital and it becomes subordinate, we have situations where the creators builds value but the owners gets most or almost all of it. We have a situation where the creator can only create if the owner say so. The creator will only do as the owner says. Owner knows best and the creator is simply there to create and nothing more. Creator has no avenues to create his own things, especially if he captures very little of the value he creates. In essence, it is a form of feudalism, slavery or put another way, communism (not by the government, but by the holder of capital).

In our world today, there is a worship of capital that condemns the creator into the same corner as the peasant in 16th century Europe, a slave in 1st century Rome or a proletariat in 20th century Soviet Russia. It is the same script but different cast and more sophisticated tools.

Why is this so dangerous? If the creator of goods and services is so undervalued and even demeaned, then why most he apply himself to create anything. This is why societies that rely too much on slaves are always defeated by those that do not. If majority of the population is not incentivised to create, build, innovate and think of new and interesting ways of doing things, then why should they work? It is the reason why medieval Europe was in the dark eyes of one millenia under the feudalism system. It is why Rome began to decline as soon as it became an empire and relied on tax extraction and slaves above innovation and production. It is why Soviet Russia could not compete with the US due to the communist system that sort to control labour to produce a set variety of capital.

When the control of labour using capital becomes the mode of day, things start to fall apart. Your brightest minds and hardworkers see no need to put their talents to work, because of one simple fact. "What is in it for me?" Capitalism and the market economy was the answer to this question and this is why has worked better than any other system on the planet. However, when capital is corrupted by crony capitalists and lotterers, we witness the same effects of feudalism, slavery and communist.

Isn't it not odd that there are those you seek political power for economic enrichment? Why not just have political power? Well, this is because everything is about one thing, the economics and the capital. In our world, everything has been reduced to a price. Everyone has a price tag on their head, if you don't know that, then you don't know what game you are playing.

However, like every price, all the decisions, perceptions and emotions of the market are aggregated into that price. Most see will see the price has bad thing but to the trained eye, some crony capitalists and other simply capitalists, it is an indicator of a society either going right or going wrong.

If there is more capital than goods and services, then the price goes up, indicating a bubble. If there is less capital than goods and services, then the price goes down, this means there is opportunity.

There are more laws than this and I claim to know nothing. I just thought this was an interesting insight to share. There is a lot to learn indeed.