patrick.net

For people who think the system is rigged. Thorstein Veblen should be your hero.
This is also related to what's happening now in the housing market.

Also this was written in 1904 so the ideas are nothing new.
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The businessman was interested in making money, whereas the machine and it's engineer masters knew no end except making goods. If the machine functioned well and fitted together smoothly, where would there be a place for a man whose only aim was profit?
Ideally there would be none. The machine was not concerned with values and proits; it ground out goods. Hence the businessman would have no function to perform....unless he turned engineer.

But as a member of the leisure class he was not interested in engineering; he wanted to accumulate. And this was something the machine was not set up to do at all. So the businessman achieved his end, not by working within the framework of the social machine, but by conspiring against it! His function was not to help make goods, but to cause breakdowns in the regular flow of output so that values would fluctuate and he coud capitalize on the confusion to reap a profit. And so, on top of the machinelike dependability of the actual production apparatus in the world, the businessman built a uperstructure of credit, loans, and make-believe capitalizations. Below, society turned over in it's mechanical routine; above , the structure of finance swayed and shited. And as the financial counterpart to the real world teetered, opportunities for profit constantly appeared, disappoeared, and reappeared....

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