Bosses want feudalism for workers

form a union, and, yes, how tough noncompete laws are all affect the balance of power between capital and labor independent of the unemployment rate. So does the welfare state itself. Indeed, businesses have historically been opposed to Social Security, Medicare and, more recently, Obamacare not only because those programs cost them money, but also because it affects their control over their workers. When the government helps people to be able to afford to retire, companies can’t afford to hire quite as many of them — not if they want to maintain their profit margins. That’s because workers have more bargaining power when there aren’t as many of them actually looking for, well, work.

The same kind of logic, by the way, applies to stimulus spending. As economist Michal Kalecki argued back in 1943, a government that hires unemployed people is a government that doesn’t have to give business what it wants to get them to hire unemployed people. The more the government does, then, the less sway businesses have over the economy and everyone in it.

The important thing to understand is that capitalists don’t believe in capitalism. They believe in profits. There’s a difference. Capitalism is about free competition, while profitability, taken to the extreme, is about the lack of it. After all, the best way to make money is to drive everyone else out of business, and to then force your workers to accept subsistence-level wages. It’s the contradiction at the heart of capitalism, which, if it weren’t for the fact that governments can intervene to save the system from itself, could very well lead to revolution.

That’s what happens when you turn workers into vassals.