Parasitic Capital - What the market can bear

 Parasitic Capital - What the market can bear

That’s a fair critique framed sharply. The phrase “what the market can bear” is often used as if it’s neutral economics, but in real life it can translate into companies charging as much as people are desperate enough to pay — whether it’s for housing, medicine, energy, or basic food.

Governments not only allow it; in many cases, they set the rules that encourage it. For example:

• Rent control is abolished or limited.

• Utility markets are deregulated.

• Monopoly protections are granted under the guise of intellectual property or national security.

The Myth of the Free Market: How ‘What the Market Can Bear’ Became Codified Extortion

In everyday conversation, you’ll hear the phrase “charge what the market can bear” tossed around like it’s just the way things work. But take a step back, and you’ll see:
This isn’t natural economics. It’s a legalised extortion racket, rubber-stamped by government policy.

What Does “What the Market Can Bear” Really Mean?

It means charging the highest price possible before customers either:

• Stop buying,

• Go broke, or

• Die.

In other words, it’s not about fair value—it’s about pushing the limits of human desperation.

Think housing. Think medicine. Think energy.
People don’t want to pay $500 a week rent or $50 for life-saving medication. They’re forced to. There’s no choice when the alternatives are living in your car or risking your health.

How Governments Codify It

This isn’t just companies acting on their own. Governments enable this system by:

• Deregulating essential markets.
  (E.g., electricity, housing, healthcare.)

• Allowing monopolies and oligopolies.
  (Think: Big Pharma patents, supermarket duopolies.)

• Failing to provide public options.
  (When there’s no public housing, private rents rise. When there’s no public pharmacy, prices skyrocket.)

Why It’s Extortion in Disguise

Imagine if a man with a knife said: “Pay me what you can bear.”
Everyone would call that robbery.
When a company does it, under government-sanctioned rules?
That’s called “the free market.”

Same effect. Different uniform.

The Quiet Normalisation

What’s even more insidious is how this gets normalised:

• News media covers rising prices like weather reports: inevitable, uncontrollable.

• Political parties of all stripes rarely challenge the premise.

• Economic textbooks teach it as science, not as policy shaped by power.

Where It Leads

Unrestrained market pricing on essentials doesn’t just create inequality.
It breeds resentment. It destabilises societies.
At some point, people look around and realise they’re being farmed—like livestock in a neatly managed paddock.

In the United States, wealth distribution data and studies suggest a structure that roughly supports what you're describing:

• Top 1% of households control around 30–35% of all wealth.

• Top 10% control around 65–70% of all wealth.

• The bottom 50% of Americans control around 2–3% of total wealth.

In plain terms:

• Fewer than 10% of people could realistically be called “capitalists” in the classical sense—owning enough capital (business equity, investments, land) to live independently of wages.

• The other 90% function more as workers, renters, debtors—socialised in the sense that they depend on collective services, public infrastructure, and wage labor.

The system looks like capitalism on top, socialised survival at the bottom.

• Extreme wealth = Private jets, private banks, controlling shares. That’s under 1%.

• Comfortable wealth = Multiple properties, investment income. Roughly top 10–15%.

• Everyone else = Wage labor, debt, reliance on government services or family safety nets.

That’s a fair and honest observation. What you're pointing at is often called “wealth lock-in” or “class entrenchment.” The paradox:

• Capitalism claims to reward risk, innovation, and effort.

• But in practice, entrenched elites hoard wealth and access, blocking upward mobility.

It’s not just personal greed—it’s structurally protected greed:

• Tax codes favoring capital over labor.

• Inheritance laws preserving generational wealth.

• Monopolistic markets and regulatory capture.

Calling it hypocritical is valid because:

• If capitalism means free competition, most people aren’t even on the starting line.

• If wealth is locked away from the majority, it’s not capitalism. It’s feudalism dressed up with stock tickers and venture capital slogans.

Parasitic Capital
The System That Consumes Itself to Feed the Few

Modern capitalism is no longer about open markets or fair competition.
It has mutated into Parasitic Capital—a two-tier system where:

• Wealth isn’t earned; it’s hoarded.

• Power isn’t competed for; it’s inherited.

• Growth for the bottom is actively prevented because real mobility threatens the status quo.

In Parasitic Capital systems, most citizens live as economic livestock:

• Locked in wage dependency.

• Priced out of assets.

• Told they’re free, while the gates stay shut.

This isn’t free enterprise. It’s a closed loop of extraction—legalised by law, enforced by debt, and justified by hollow slogans.

Parasitic Capital feeds on the many to sustain the few.
Calling it capitalism is hypocrisy. Naming it for what it is—that’s the first step to dismantling it.