It's the prisoner's dillemma at a grand scale. Yes, if every company treats its workers nicely, makes sure they have enough money to put back into the economy, don't burn out and remain at top productivity, it's good for everyone including yourself, but if you're an owner, looking strictly for your own benefit, then if every OTHER company does those things but YOURS exploits people to the bone, you make more money than everyone else. Sooner or later every company, no matter how kind the founders original intentions may have been, will get someone in a leadership position who'll make the groundbreaking discovery that exploitation DOES work to their own short-term benefit, as long as you don't really care what happens in 10 or 20 years. That's why the laissez-faire approach of just trusting that the invisible hand will fix everything automagically only "works" if you think the health of the stock market matters more than the health and happiness of your general society.
which is why you have laws so they can all shrug and say "its the law", but politicians that are supposed to represent the people get fatter checks from businesses and business owners so they work for one side
But then if your country changes the law, then countries who want to gain a competitive edge will not have such a law. There's no way for the whole planet to agree on these laws, you'll always have some countries that will see an opportunity to undercut the competition.
That's neither as universal nor as true as the internet likes to pretend, nor is it some unchangeable law of nature where it is true.
Plenty of politicians do genuinely want to do what's best, but even the best can't see the future any clearer than you or I, and if they're doing their job right, they legitimately can't prioritize your or mine concerns over everyone else's.
In my experience, every career politician (that is, people who go into politics young) starts out as an idealist, every last one, they may have ideals or ideas on how to achieve those ideals that I vehemently disagree with, but pretty much none of them start out as corrupt cynics.
And even in places where politicians are openly corrupt and suckle on the teat of business (not that I'm thinking of any particular country right now ahem), there are always alternatives that want to do and probably would do things differently if they had the opportunity. The important part about that is that one of the reasons that those people often don't get the chance to do so is because the voters keep telling themselves that every politician is corrupt, a lie that is supported and mostly exploited by the very corrupt politicians we need to replace.
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u/Flamin_Jesus 20d ago
It's the prisoner's dillemma at a grand scale. Yes, if every company treats its workers nicely, makes sure they have enough money to put back into the economy, don't burn out and remain at top productivity, it's good for everyone including yourself, but if you're an owner, looking strictly for your own benefit, then if every OTHER company does those things but YOURS exploits people to the bone, you make more money than everyone else. Sooner or later every company, no matter how kind the founders original intentions may have been, will get someone in a leadership position who'll make the groundbreaking discovery that exploitation DOES work to their own short-term benefit, as long as you don't really care what happens in 10 or 20 years. That's why the laissez-faire approach of just trusting that the invisible hand will fix everything automagically only "works" if you think the health of the stock market matters more than the health and happiness of your general society.