Capital over Labour Is Dangerous

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 is 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.

Capital builds neither roads nor bridges, treats neither illness nor grows food. It does not invent, teach, heal, or cultivate. It is a lever, not a mind. A multiplier, not a source. When capital forgets this, it starts demanding reverence instead of service.

When 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 do not fund roads. They do not invent vaccines. They do not manage factories. They re-forge capital like alchemists chasing more of the same glittering metal. Capital compounds inside its own echo chamber, detached from the goods and services that once justified it.

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

Capital becomes a claim on labour that no longer needs to exist.

We’ve Seen This Movie—In Costume After Costume

History keeps warning us, and we keep refusing to listen.

In 16th-century Europe, feudal lords hoarded land deeds while peasants tilled soil that would never be theirs.

In 1st-century Rome, slaves built marble forums while senators speculated on grain prices. The empire rotted from the inside out.

In 20th-century Soviet Russia, the state held every factory share certificate while workers queued for bread they had baked themselves.

The props change—scrolls, sesterces, rubles, or today’s triple-leveraged ETFs—but the script remains painfully familiar. When ownership eclipses contribution, decay follows.

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? Why strain, risk, and sacrifice if the rewards are predetermined by access rather than effort?

Civilisations that lean too hard on coerced or under-rewarded labour always get out-innovated by those that honour makers. Empires fat on tribute fall to scrappy upstarts who still value sweat, competence, and ingenuity. This is not ideology—it is pattern recognition.

Reading the Warning Lights

Economists dress it up, but the signal is simple:

When there is more capital than real output, prices inflate and bubbles form.

When there is more output than capital, prices fall—and opportunity appears.

Today, the gauges are blinking red. Asset charts rocket while median wages limp behind. A tiny cadre arbitrages paper claims at scale, while everyone else juggles rent, school fees, healthcare, and fuel. The distance between effort and reward stretches thin enough to snap.

So What Do We Do—Short of Smashing the Machines?

The answer is not to destroy capital, but to discipline it.

Tie capital back to creation: equity for builders, fair royalty splits for artists, ownership structures where staff hold real stakes, not symbolic scraps.

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

Open the capital club. Let ordinary people invest in productive assets—farms, factories, infrastructure—not just gamble on inflated abstractions.

Celebrate craft again. Give cultural prestige to engineers, teachers, builders, and farmers—not only to deal-makers ringing closing bells.

A 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 return to building things that matter.

That’s all I wanted to say—for now.