Like at some point won’t all of the profit be squeezed out of society?
You’ve discovered capitalism’s super hidden secret; infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.
Yes, there is a limit.
First, you need to look at the difference between 1. money and 2. value.
That theoretical one rich person (or company) might own all money printing facilities in the world, and therefore can make endless numbers. That is money, not value.
There is theoretically no limit for the money. But this is meaningless, because this kind of inflated money would be valueless.
The one rich person might own everybody else, and all their belongings, and all that they can produce.
That’s all the value then. That’s your limit.
Isnt that why there are transnational conglomerates?
No. They can always print more money. Money is no longer backed by anything other than faith; if people believe money has value, there’s no hard set limit on that value
In case you want a serious treatment, for nominal profit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_economics#The_Keynesian_multiplier
For real profit, labor productivity must put some limit on it somewhere, but I have never seen anybody look at it.
Either way, “profit” is not something you squeeze out of society. The nominal one can’t be unbalanced, and the real one is hard to even track.
You may get some better answers if think in terms of wealth inequality. But that one won’t appear on the coarse level of the wikipedia article.
I beg to differ, how the modern shareholder capitalism works is nothing but squeezing profit out of society
Theoretically? I’d imagine it’s equal (or close) to the difference between global money supply and global money supply but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking
Maximum profit would be achieved by charging the most for the least stuff. And minimizing the cost of that bare minimum. You can do that by eliminating competition so that your prices are the only option. You’d end up with something like feudalism.
But it also depends if you target maximum profits as compared to the population, or maximum profits over all. If maximum profits over all, you’d want to grow the work force as much as possible, maybe colonizing other planets or inhospitable regions of earth.
But maximizing the value of those profits to you requires development to get you more value for less resources. Being a king hundreds of years ago still didn’t get you decent plumbing. So you’d want effecent ways to maximize your pleasure for the lowest cost. Some brain computer interface could be useful there, so that you can create full planets more cheaply.
What happens after all of humanity are enslaved as software devs for the god kings personal virtual reality, I couldn’t guess.
In a sense yes. Once a company has captured the entire (global) economy, including banking, it would control who to give credit to, who to employ, what to pay them, what their own products are priced.
They could at most reap as “profit” what they give out in credit and payment.
There may be sub-limits for capturing entire industries.
No. Or at least not while inflation exists.
That’s not the point of inflation.
Our economy needs inflation to discourage saving and incentive investing.
If there was no inflation and 3% interest on savings, that’s all people would do.
So they make inflation more, and people lose purchasing power in a savings account, and instead invest, which pumps up stock prices for the whales who knows when to cash out.
On a smaller level it incentives people to spend as soon as they get it, because next year a $100 is worth less, so they spend while it’s worth more.
It’s a house of cards and when the wealthy owns the government there’s no one to hit the brakes on profits before the economy crashes and burns.
Where do you think profit comes from? Spending is what makes profit happen.
Inflation or deflation always exist. The question is to what degree. I would revisit your understanding of this topic if possible.
Inflation and deflation are mutually exclusive they can’t both exist at the same time.
I didn’t contradict what you just typed despite what you think I intended.
No, let me know if you find one though
There’s an actual limit to profit, they are called profit margins and different industries have different profit margins.
