Said it yourself, “power [is a] means to acquire more money.” And the way society has been structured means we, the workers and consumers, are the product - we are the money (arguably always have been).
As such, it honestly makes sense to establish more and more layers of control, not only as a means of reinforcing and securing their positions (it’s harder to fight against Fascism if you can’t even call it Fascism, for instance), but also to wrangle the cattle, as it were.
I mean, if you’d be making your money off of rearing cows, you wouldn’t want them rebelling in any way. Complicates the road to profit.
Control can help facilitate making more money, but not always. Slavery was horribly inefficient for industrial work, for example, so the industrialists in the Statesian north went to war with the slaver agriculturalists in the south to expand the supply of wage laborers. Wage laborers are under less direct control, but are more willing to do complicated work, as they don’t have an assured existence.
Power is the means to the end, the end being profit. It isn’t the other way around.
Said it yourself, “power [is a] means to acquire more money.” And the way society has been structured means we, the workers and consumers, are the product - we are the money (arguably always have been).
As such, it honestly makes sense to establish more and more layers of control, not only as a means of reinforcing and securing their positions (it’s harder to fight against Fascism if you can’t even call it Fascism, for instance), but also to wrangle the cattle, as it were.
I mean, if you’d be making your money off of rearing cows, you wouldn’t want them rebelling in any way. Complicates the road to profit.
Control can help facilitate making more money, but not always. Slavery was horribly inefficient for industrial work, for example, so the industrialists in the Statesian north went to war with the slaver agriculturalists in the south to expand the supply of wage laborers. Wage laborers are under less direct control, but are more willing to do complicated work, as they don’t have an assured existence.
Power is the means to the end, the end being profit. It isn’t the other way around.