The Slippery Slope

OK - here's my take on things business/economic, and I'll go all in and say off the bat, that the problem with capitalism as it stands today is not that there's too much profit, but rather that there's too little. Capitalism is not just the sole fiefdom of the corporate world, or the wealth management bubble, or of the landowning gentry 'farming' classes. It is business, first and foremost. That includes the corner shop in my tiny village square and the myriad micro-businesses plying their trade in home-made clothes, jewellery, cakes, fancies and any number of other perfectly good, worthwhile and saleable goods, offered by individual and family traders throughout the world.

A small business, which by definition will have a small turnover, needs to earn a decent profit on its sales, over and above its costs and overheads, in order to make a living and ensure its survival. In any normal market on the scale that small businesses would have traditionally operated, that was achievable. Now, the corporates, who can afford, by dint of scale and influence, to operate at profit-margins set at ludicrously low levels of one or two percent, and often in negative figures on loss-leaders; have distorted markets to the point where the smaller business simply can't compete and survive: the playing field is a steep and unforgiving slope biassed in the favour of the corporate entity. This is not capitalism, it is hegemony.