Basically over the last few decades economic thought has had a few basic distinctions bleached away from it and one of the most important ones is a distinction between:
1. Productive capital - Infrastructure, R&D capacity, manufacturing equipment, energy production, material acquisition and refining.
2. Extractive capital - Rent-seeking, monopoly abuse, toll-taking, debt service.
With that distinction no longer there, it's far more profitable for example for a bank to lend money for a corporate raider to leverage a company's cashflow to buyback its own shares than it is to finance actual growth in the real economy.
More and more of the economy switches over the acquisition of extractive capital to harvest debt service and siphon surplus from whatever parts of the economy are productive. It's not too dissimilar from how a parasite or a tumor operates.
Slowly over time the parasite needs more and more from its host because of the fallacy of the "miracle of compound interest" - just like a tumor it is no longer benign and hell bent on continuing to feed and grow even if it kills the host - the host begins to have symptoms and so does an economy.
This starts to become observable in shifts in tax policy, legislation and culture:
1. Debt service too much? The women aren't paying taxes - harvest the women too.
2. Debt service too much? If they won't give us more work for less, move the work elsewhere, put them in further debt to ease the transition, they'll sell their children to us for the illusion of a standard of living now.
3. Debt service too much? Their children aren't able to afford to have more children or buy houses because they also think they can have the standard of living their parents sold them out for?
That's okay, we don't need them to have children - bring in immigrants. As "refugees" or whatever who cares.
If you try to detach this parasite from you it will kill you in the process.
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