Greed, Unintended Consequences, and Shortsightedness

Today, while I was having a routine Coffee Stout indulgence at Bridge Brewing, I was talking to a staff member there about a range of different things, ranging from my job to just my usual intrigue. One of the topics that came up was debt, ranging from student loans to medical debt and other forms.

   The conversation got me thinking about a principle one of my economic professor friends had exposed me to over the past few years. It was called the law of unintended consequences. To some it up, whenever you make an economic or social policy or practice a certain method of operating, there are always unintended consequences that you couldn't account for or anticipate, no matter how well thought out your plan and practice was or how much you thought the scenario was contained or controlled.

       Greed is one of those things that can have massive and severely detrimental unintended consequences, and the person who is greedy is so shortsighted and impatient that they only focus on the short-term, immediate gains and profits without considering the serious ramifications and long term consequences of their economic selfishness. 

        Greed can be so detrimental even in the hands of a small minority of elites that these elites don't realize that their self-serving greed could very well collapse the whole economic system that made them rich in the first place. For starters, if you leach your consumers into poverty, how can they afford to continuously purchase your product or service that allows for your continuing accruance of wealth. 

      Wealth inequality will always inevitably lead to the disruption and/or collapse of an economic system, either through class conflict or a massive economic downturn. The people who are blinded and made to be shortsighted by their self-serving greed will never see this before the system goes over the precipice. 

         All it took was the spook of a pandemic to pretty much collapse the economy. That's an unforeseen circumstance with massive economic consequences, and if that is all it takes to wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth, maybe we aren't as strong, intelligent, or advanced as we think we are.

       The problem of debt is also a massively destructive issue within economic systems. Debt is usually accrued in the attempt to make large short term asset accruences possible while passing the payment for the assets down months or even years. Debt allows many of us to live well beyond our means, acquiring resources and materials that otherwise would have been impossible to get without going into debt.

         Debt is the illusion of wealth, and a system based on massive debt that is all but impossible to pay back has a false foundation, one so fragile all it takes is a "nudge" to expose the illusion of that foundation and cause its collapse. When a service is made so expensive that it causes the consumers of that service to go into massive long term debt that may never be able to be paid back, then market is on a massively unsustainable path and it is a path towards future collapse. Systems like this include healthcare and higher education, whose very set up breaks the financial back of the poor and underpriviledged, and sometimes confines them into a socioeconomic class permanently, all but obliterating their upward mobility. 

      These systems are rooted in greed, and the  unintended consequences of these systems that the primary benefactors of the "wealth"  these systems create cannot see because of the shortsightedness of their greed and decadence is the future collapse of the systems that made them wealthy to begin with. They lose when this happens just as the people they exploited lose as well. They just don't see it until its too late.

Have a good day friends and heroes!

Stay safe, healthy, and economically stable!