So what can go wrong with a society of acquisitors? Let's start with what can go right. At first they are the ones who innovate in productivity and foster efficiency and invention. They are good at organizing the workforce to make things less expensively so in part that workers get things that they could not get when the intellectuals tell the common man who works the fields and chops the wood that Man does not live by bread alone". That's easy for a mystic or an ivory-tower intellectual to say if one gets all one's needs easily met and disparages the material life as corrupt and debased. The intellectuals may be good at writing lofty poetry and wondrous music, discovering mathematical theorems, or giving long-winded explanations of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Such does not deed people. Capitalists can turn unemployed people into industrial workers who get paid for their efforts with wages that can buy food and maybe some mass-produced shoes, crockery, and chairs. Capitalists can be like Josiah Wedgwood with his mass-produced dinner plates, John D. Rockefeller II with his cheap energy from petroleum, Henry Ford with automobiles that workers could pay for with their wages, William Levitt with houses in suburbia that offered more floor-space for the money than what people paid for in the awful urban apartments of the time, or retailers from John Wanamaker to James Cash Penney to the Skaggs brothers to Sam Walton who made shopping cheaper.
Those people cut the profit margins and costs and made things more affordable. The problem comes when capitalists are more effective at constricting supply and raising prices. Capitalists at their worst become rentiers who make easy money off people who have the dubious privilege in living in the midst of those capitalists. People may admire Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos but despise the slum-lord and the loan-shark. As capitalists become more adept at gouging and less innovative they try to turn the government into an enforcer of their will. Those same capitalists also restrict opportunity for workers, thus driving real pay down, and find ways to exclude small businesses attempting to fill niches that might draw away unsatisfied customers. Capitalism becomes depraved and cruel.
Note well that the masses start getting angry, and if there were no Karl Marx they would create an equivalent.
Those people cut the profit margins and costs and made things more affordable. The problem comes when capitalists are more effective at constricting supply and raising prices. Capitalists at their worst become rentiers who make easy money off people who have the dubious privilege in living in the midst of those capitalists. People may admire Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos but despise the slum-lord and the loan-shark. As capitalists become more adept at gouging and less innovative they try to turn the government into an enforcer of their will. Those same capitalists also restrict opportunity for workers, thus driving real pay down, and find ways to exclude small businesses attempting to fill niches that might draw away unsatisfied customers. Capitalism becomes depraved and cruel.
Note well that the masses start getting angry, and if there were no Karl Marx they would create an equivalent.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.