Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented.
A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.
That's pretty much the game plan for every private equity acquisition: exchange brand goodwill (and all other sources of value) for profits, pocket the profits, leave the empty husk behind.
This is mostly how I see it too.
I've wondered recently if it was possible to plot that curve and use it to show which companies are still on the quality portion of the arc and which are on the downturn.
When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting Linux rescue disks into the EEPROM, because appropriately sized ROMs no longer existed.
You can find better equipment and processes that get you more product per hour out the door without necessarily making the product shittier.
Parent comment explicitly says this happens when a sector runs out of things to innovate on. Chips are still innovating like crazy which is why we're seeing some amazing processing/CPU/GPU/DSP chips/etc. If we ever hit on the limits of moores law, watch those CPUs become shittier and shittier over a 10 year period.
I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point - "growth at any cost" does actually rise the tide and bring up all boats when there is a lot of room for innovation. It just starts harming when a sector has diminishing returns on innovation. So you'll be able to come up with plenty of counter examples where growth mindset is really beneficial because it's very context sensitive.
I suspect you know better than this. Failure of imagination does not mean lack of options. People in our industry reach for next steps that cut off other options in the process, all the time. To assume manufacturing doesn’t have the same problem is questionable.
Sure, but it's a hacker news comment, not a book. To be more clear I mean functionally run out of things. To be even more clear, when ROI on innovation becomes less than ROI on simply making product cheaper. There's always innovations, and some may even be missed, but when the perception of the industry is that future innovations cost more than the loss of good will of making worse product then it's obvious what will be picked.
I think the solution is to make "loss of good will" valued higher, right now it's valued very low by investors since people want to hold investments a short time and exit quickly. CEOs elected by boards controlled by shareholders are the same way. Short term growth is incentivized and that undervalues long term retention of customers, which makes it more likely "manufacture a worse product" a better option than "innovate and make a better product that more people will want".
Yup, the thing is the price difference between the humongous flash (do they even do EEPROM anymore?) and the "appropriate" one is less than the overhead of designing/making/handling different sizes. And the bigger the chip the more sectors for wear leveling and you can tolerate lower total write counts on the chip.
Thus we end up with circuits designed to feed the reinforced concrete outhouse in the center. And they're unrepairable because the troubleshooting cost is more than the replacement cost.
What's really annoying is when you do find a company that produces quality product and then it get's bought by one of the big brands and then the process you outline starts to happen - the brand is exploited through a combination of marketing and cost cutting.
What makes these quality brands sell out? I suspect when they become a target of the bigger company, there is a combination of carrot and stick - with the stick having a significant component of the larger company using it's channel dominance to exert pressure.
This is exactly what I came to say - growth as the primary goal DOES create innovation, until innovation in that field yields diminishing returns or bottoms out completely, then it creates shittier and shittier product.
The entire American version of capitalism is built around growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating more and more shitty things.
It's so hard for anyone to acknowledge this because everyone wants to take a "side", pro- or anti-capitalism, without being realistic that there are different implementations of capitalism and there is no system that universally works, it really depends on the situation. Right now we need to make "lifestyle company" not a bad word in investment circles, focus on dividends/revenue sharing over stock growth, create incentives around steady, well run companies, and not companies that outspend and destroy competition and then make their product shittier and/or more expensive.
I agree with a lot of what you are bringing up, but I don’t think of these things as synonymous with American capitalism as a whole. I think of them more as a failure mode.
I think it’s very human to keep doing what once helped us when even when it starts harming us. Like an alcoholic who started to help get over social anxiety and saw positive results early on but then starts seeing drink as what makes them happy rather than the social connection it helped facilitate. Yes I’m saying America is addicted to growth.
(I agree it’s more nuanced than that and it’s both succeeded and failed in other ways, and US isn’t the only one - but this a major feature of American capitalism)
It’s hard to compare. Almost everything at a mass market price point is made in China. From luxury iPhones to cheap commodity crap. With the exception of maybe cars, made in USA, Europe or Japan tends to be niche or specialty.
Yes, but that's creating products primarily for capitalist markets. So the same demand drivers exist, even if it's being produced in a semi-socialist country.
No, and that’s not what I said. In fact I said being blindly pro or anti capitalism blinds people to things that could be fixed. Growth helps innovate and create great products up to point of innovation creating diminishing returns.
There’s a huge difference between capitalism and a specific implementation of capitalism.
The product people really want often isn't on the market at all. I speak of a product that is:
- Mass produced at scale
- High quality and will "last a lifetime" (a long time)
- Repairable when it breaks down
I believe that many people would happily pay a 20%, 50% or even 100% markup for such a product, but often often all of the available mass produced options are shitty quality (and the choice is between a bargain option or a "premium" option that is just as crappy quality but costs more because of the brand name). There might be a "boutique" hand-crafted alternative, but it will cost 5-10x more.
The other problem is imperfect access to information. Even where there is superior alternative on the market, it is often very difficult for consumers to determine which one it is. Which means they can't choose it. Which further means, there is no incentive for manufacturers to produce it.
I don't know that this is realistic. Like you recognize, there ARE usually boutique higher quality products - at significantly higher prices. There are also nearly always product management-based, "higher end" product lines. And the quality of these is only sometimes better. And they are not often repairable probably.
I think there is a significant issue with achieving "Mass produced at scale" together with "lifetime and repairable (ie, parts available and easy to replace)". Without people going out of their way to be evil, see lightbulb lifetime mgt, it's easy to be too expensive to miss the "mass produced" window, and your price might be much higher. Not just 20% higher.
Chinese companies built massive factories to corner the market on specific products. Years ago, see the halogen torchiere market. Suddenly the world was flooded with torchiere halogen lamps for an insanely low price. ... a price so low that nobody could really complain that spare parts were not available. These stunts must have been very expensive. An all or nothing bet on a market.
Nowadays, you get factories that make ALL the models of, say, steam irons for basically ALL the brands. These factories take care of some of the issue of quantity-related low price, by sharing parts and processes between all these brands. But could they be competitive in price on smaller runs of steam irons with replaceable parts? Plus the cost of stocking and distributing these parts? I don't know.
You've forgotten your Pratchett. Quoth Men at Arms:
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
1. "People here" are a very small fraction of the economy. They may in fact buy superior products over cheap ones, but their numbers are too small to matter much.
2. People don't always do what they say. They want superior quality, but they also want it at the same price as the inferior alternative. When push comes to shove, which will they choose? Not all will choose quality over cheapness. That doesn't mean they didn't want quality. It just means they didn't want it as much as they say they did.
Also "market for lemons"- a friend told me she used to go to Macys/Dillards to buy $50 bath towels b/c they were better, nicer, more durable than the $20 ones from Walmart.
Now she goes and still pays $50 for them, but they have been stealthily replaced by the equivalent of the inferior $20 ones.
It becomes a market for lemons: you can't trust that paying more for a product gets you a better product so game theory says you have to pursue price minimization at all costs.
Because capital doesn't like to fund them. Being worker-owned limits the potential upside for investors so a collective or co-op needs to be able to bootstrap itself to success, at which point capital will just fund a competitor that allows them to extract their desired rents.
Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.
> no policy incentives
Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?
> lack of funding platforms
Nobody is stopping anyone from funding a collective. The reason they don't is they won't get ownership shares in return. That's one of the problems with a collective.
If they got the same incentives offered to businesses, that would be interesting.
Coops are fairly common in Europe, mostly in agro-food and related areas.
They're actually better at innovation for their market segments, because they can make long-term plans for expansion instead of being hamstrung by the demands of ridiculous short-term marketing-driven hype bubbles.
But if you want to profit from frothy get-rich-quick hype and don't care if this year's unicorn is next year's "Our incredible adventure comes to an end", they're definitely not for you.
> Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.
Before buying, you need to startup and produce.
> Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?
Its the other way around. They are not eligible for incentives that are available to traditional corporations. They cannot issue traditional equity. There are also no equivalent cooperative-friendly structure like a Delaware C corporation which allows for friendly taxation and non-liability for the debts and legal obligations of the corporation. Difficult to apply R&D Tax Credit like corporations since it cannot carry forward credits due to legal constraints. Cannot claim Payroll Offset like startups do, etc.
The system in the US simply does not give incentives to cooperatives to the same extent that it facilitates corporations.
Publix has a model similar to this and it seems to work well for them both as a former employee and a customer. Their stores and products are always nice and they pay above average for their sector. They are on the expensive side but also they have good deals when you look for them especially the BOGOs. I definitely had a better time working for them than I did when I worked for Sprouts which is publicly traded and aiming at a similar market segment. I think if we are going to stick with some capitalism we need to switch to models like Publix and away from models like Sprouts and Walmart.
People on both sides of the capitalism/socialism divide also always conflate "Current Way Stock Markets Work" with capitalism. We do alot of extra damage to the average person's health and well being with the WAY we do capitalism. The plutocrats use the heavily propagandized stick of "SCARY SOCIALISM" to give you a more shriveled carrot year after year and tell you you should be thankful you dont get beat with the "SCARY SOCIALISM" stick while they still hit you with the "NO HOUSE, NO FOOD, NO HEALTHCARE" stick if you can't sell your bodily capital for enough value to please them.
The extra damage is all this profit over anything else no matter the circumstance. Look at United Healthcare getting sued because the new CEO, even if it was purely out of self preservation, decides they are going to actually give people some of the coverage they paid for and not do quite as many dirty tricks to skim as many denials off the top as they possibly can. MANY SUCH CASES
because they are a fantasy of people who have never once in their life seen what happens to a company with a strong union or excessive worker power, they become repressive towards newer employees among other things
I'll half-disagree. There are situations where "workers" having a seat at the table can produce favourable outcomes. Some German companies have union representation on the board and it results in workers sometimes willing to make sacrifices for the greater good, so long as they also then benefit if an upside materializes. It can also benefit the company as the top-down decisions can also receive comments and concerns from a different viewpoint within the company.
But it's also very much a cultural thing. The anglosphere tends to treat CEOs and corporate leaders as the smart drivers of corporate success, where as Germany and other European companies are more comfortable with some collective ways of working.
There's benefits to both models, but there's no arguing against the fact that the "anglo" way does seem much more successful at the entrepreneurial stages, especially with new ideas and industries.
I myself prefer the anglo-model, but I try my best to find places that appreciate and trust their workers. I also find myself appreciating goods that last a lifetime from "boring, but stable" companies. People like Jack Welch and his acolytes ruin companies.
There's plenty of arguing about whether the entrepreneurial stages are more successful.
Financially? Of course, in the narrow stonks-go-up sense. But not so much in the kind of wealth distribution that accelerates inventiveness and creativity of all kinds at all wealth levels.
The kinds of products that are developed tend to be packaged digital (re)intermediations, fintech, and ad tech, all of which are more likely to be hype-boosted corporate slop with toxic consequences than a genuine boon to the culture around them.
It's a model that's more likely to create the next Theranos than the next Jonas Salk.
It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?
> How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one?
An outfit like Amazon is in a position to make reviews work better. And when I buy on Amazon, I do pay attention to reviews. Of all kinds, text, photos, videos, plus other cues such as quantity sold and what other things do the sellers sell, quality of the description. Amazon could do better. Will Amazon improve the review mechanisms to fight abuse and garbage? I don't know. It seems to me that they have won the race, as it is, and they are now in a position where it's their choice to lose it again to the up and comers or to let us better figure out the tradeoff price-quality and keep their lead.
Prices are so gamed though, they are basically drawn by salesmen, marketers, VCs, 200% profit CEOs and what not. Recent fad is to provide no description of the product, even on the vendor site, to reduce your ability to choose based on features, so you choose completely at random or based on price alone. You can buy anything and have no idea what it's made of.
Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products.
The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in three years, or I buy a product and it's trash and unsuitable for its purpose, the company still already has my money. I have to care enough about the purchase to spend time and effort into writing a review online about the product, and the brand, which will go into the circular filing cabinet. For a $20 thermometer, I'm not even going to bother.
Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons that we had had broken accessories (though they happily replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years or so.
We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).
Miele is one brand that seems to show that it's still possible (to build lasting and repairable). But it's expensive, very expensive, and repairs themselves are not cheap. I would say, too expensive overall to become a default choice.
Parts are another story.
I have miele Washing Machine. It has brushed motor so after ~8 years I need to replace brushes. Miele ones cost 60$. That's 20% price of cheapest washing machine I found on market. Im' sure 40$ of that is handling those spare parts across many years.
Other, more complicated components cost more than cheap, other vendor washing machine.
Do not get any of their fans. They are designed to fail.
They use a wimpy brushless motor mounted vertically and then shove a impeller on the top of it to move air. The problem is, they don't balance the impeller. And when I saw the motor is wimpy, I mean it's shaft is barely a 1/4". The motor shaft ends up destroying the bearings within a year or two due to the unbalanced impeller load. You will be annoyed to fuck by the high pitched noises it starts making from shot bearings.the bearings are integrated into the motor assembly so you can't just replace them. You have to replace the entire motor and do this basically every year or two because it's not a motor defect, it's a design defect.
Dyson is shit now though. Maybe it used to be good but like many other established names they are squandering their good name for more profits by cutting quality.
I think GP is right. We buy stuff online now. You can't see, touch, or evaluate anything. Reviews are all fake. Brand names are comingled with counterfeits. The only signal left is price. So knowing it's likely going to be crap, why pay more than you have to.
Thankfully, the citizenry is irrational and self-interested, which enables an entire cottage industry of sheisters, marketers and psychologists, which then engineer our attention spans and purchasing decisions.
The era of the "brand" is over. Consumers have gotten wise to companies cutting corners while raising prices, burning up the goodwill earned on their past reputation for quality.
Apple had a top brand, yet most consumers are aware that now Apple Stores are overcrowded messes and the iPhone 16 doesn't offer anything meaningfully different than iPhone 13.
Netflix replaced AAA TV series licensed from other networks with in-house material, the overwhelming majority most of which is cheaply produced shovelware that doesn't make it to Season 2.
That's just not true. Look around you right now. If you're American, almost everything you own is branded. Your phone, your laptop, TV, clothes you're wearing, shoes, books, food in your pantry, transportation.
There is almost always a cheaper non-branded choice. If you are like 99.99% of Americans, you didn't make that choice in almost every case.
Tellingly, you gave the example of Apple. Whether it's an iPhone 16 or an iPhone 13, more people than ever buy the Apple brand. I know I do.
You need to factor in planned obsolescence. The fundamentals of the market simply does not make sense when your product is cheap and lifecycle is long.
Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed and for them to maximize the lifecycle of a lightbulb.
A lightbulb is a fascinating example, because there’s an argument to be made that a “minimum government specification” lightbulb would be superior to what the market provides (read: under-spec’d cheap caps that die due to heat https://www.edn.com/ensure-long-lifetimes-from-electrolytic-... ).
I’m tired of having to replace whole LED light fixtures instead of being able to replace a bulb. I am currently waiting on a special order to arrive with 2 fluorescent light fixtures. I refuse to put up more LED fixtures that will go bad in another 2 years.
It seems to me that for products that in general are cheap to buy as well as produce, companies would want to make these products somewhat longer-lasting to gain a better reputation and then make more sales and larger profits on more expensive items.
I think the fundamental problem here is that nobody trusts brands anymore because we have been trained by strategies like market segmentation and private equity cost cutting that the vast majority of brands don't consistently indicate quality. That product A could be fine and a very similar-looking product B could be horrible, and any company or even product could become shit at any moment. Breyers in the US is a great example - they sell real (though still watery) ice cream in the cartons that say "naturals," and all the other very similar looking cartons are full of crap artificial frozen dairy dessert. They had a very strong brand, and they decided it was time to cash out that brand goodwill by cheaping out, but deceptively so they could ride it out for a few decades, at which point who cares?
This has led to a situation where companies don't make any attempt anymore to gain a reputation for the quality of their products, because it's futile to convince the public that they can trust you. And also, they have to compete much more equally with alphabet soup brands on Amazon making the absolute cheapest version of products at the lowest margins (and labor costs). So why would anyone make a better lightbulb that no one will buy because it's $2 more expensive?
Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets.
Absent boom-bust, and the related fraud/true-up that happens cyclically, you have sustained growth mirroring population growth, without the chaotic whipsaw, as well as other factors of general wear and tear that make sustain demand.
Less cost, and cost that follows real stable value without distortion, leads to more production over time, not less. Boom bust dynamics cause a slight move forward, followed my two steps back; repeatedly, until your out of steps.
In such older economies, you don't lose out such monumental opportunity cost and related resources to fraud or people who sit on their hands. Opportunity cost is immeasurable without a reference, so you don't know what you lose, or what could have been.
> Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed...
Honestly, seeing this rhetoric makes you sound like a shill peddling propaganda towards centralization as a solution, which includes both fascism and communism (statism for both), while ignoring the established failures of such systems.
I don't mean to be critical of what you have to say, but you come off as really ignorant, or deliberately misleading.
If you can only run on the same path on a circle, do you really think you'll eventually get to where you want to go when that point is not on the circle?
> Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets.
I have no idea why you're claiming that. What should I read?
But you're not going to get rid of business cycles by not having 2% inflation or whatever, and those cycles don't seem strong enough to impact product lifetimes all that much. "chaotic whipsaw" is a big exaggeration.
To start, you need to have a correct grasp of economics.
Hazlitt (Economics in 1 lesson), Mises (Human Action/Money and the Theory of Credit), Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Thomas Jefferson's letters to Thomas Cooper, Carl Menger (SVT) to start.
Adam Smith provides the requirements for factors and producers to operate in a market, also describing markets pre-fiat in a five volume set. The observations made are invaluable when comparing against the non-reserve modern monetary mechanics where they departed from fractional reserve in 2020 under Basel3.
In terms of actual monetary debasement/inflation, going back to the unobscured calculations before manipulations began occuring, its been much higher than 2% YOY, and the interest rates have been manipulated to a point where the delayed dynamics are in full swing and can't be prevented. Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio/Bridgewater Associates provides useful data, but his conclusions are rose-tinted.
The objective point of failure to non-market socialism from money-printing is where national outflows exceed inflows in debt growth to gdp, and in the private debt market that's likely already occurred we have a few years yet before another true-up. It gets to that point through concentration of business which concentrates bad decisions, and legitimate entities can't compete with slave labor, eventually leading to hyper-inflation then to deflation, or directly to deflation. Damned on both sides, with the safe shifting path dependent on lagging indicators amid chaos.
Each boom bust cycle started small on adoption to fiat, but has increased exponentially every 10 years where the banks are forced to crisis from bad investments, and seeking bailout during a true-up. Penn Station Bailout (1970s), Savings & Loan Crisis (1980s), Dotcom Bust (2000), Lehman CDOs 2008, the next will be the CDO equivalent for business (but that bubble hasn't burst yet) QE 2010-2022? (pure money printing to those banks), etc.
There is a third-party in the economic process, the money-lenders friend who receives preferential rates, allowing them to lower prices below cost to drive businesses out of business where leveraged buyouts aren't an option.
You are right 2% isn't sufficient by itself to cause whipsaws.
Its not just business in isolation, its the entire monetary cycle in aggregate.
What about the petrodollar abandonment, and the loss of foreign demand for a pool of money we printed up to meet that demand over 50 years. Where's it go? What about paper warrants of commodities, where the ratio is now greater than 300 non-existent paper: 1 physical, where everyone starts requiring physical delivery (taking it out of the vault). Synthetic shares through options contracts.
The deficit spending of the government, or unfunded liabilities (social security), where the debt on that to pass the budget must be almost completely borrowed (and the associated interest rate risk).
Lets not forget the swap lines between other central banks and ours, and the carry trades happening, or the preferential swaps of existing already purchased treasuries for existing current rate treasuries 1:1 (no discount); blackrock and others.
One thing, would slow it down, but the magnitude of each of these things fuels it moving forward chaotically as it unwinds; and people don't have the capital to draw from anymore because its been systematically debased for decades.
Keynes has historically failed to properly account for the business cycle under fiat; a notable recent example being the housing crisis.
Real markets require money meeting 3 properties (stable store of value...), adversarial independent decision-making based on a cost constraint, and working visible price discovery to function (aka economic calculation), with little regulation/interference.
When these can't happen with money-printing, distortions naturally occur chaotically starting with the first rung of spending from that bank as a small blip, and growing to tsunami heights. Lets not forget what that AI may zero out most white-collar jobs, already having profound disruption in the factor markets, which whipsaw to the producer markets in a spiral.
You may want to also read about the economic history of Argentina and how Milei turned everything around with almost 100 years of poverty caused by the same policies we have been doing, and how he made such giant strides to fixing it within 1 year; by firing the parasites, removing the regulations, and letting the market do its thing.
State-controlled entities cooperate because they depend on the debt for continued existence, however indirect/laundered it came to them it originated in money-printing, and its not given to them for free; coercion and malign influence is well documented in many areas related to this. (i.e. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which may or may not be fictional; but the details match up, some of which weren't validated until recent releases.
I'd say you have quite a bit of reading ahead of you.
I'll go look at those but a few things first. Business cycles existed before those monetary changes. I cannot figure out what you're accusing of being socialism. Deficit spending causes problems but you can borrow to spend without any fiat and printing and inflation improve the situation of governmental debt. Crooked handouts don't need fiat printing.
Business cycles as a phrase have existed, but that definition has changed over time, and people conflate the modern meaning neglecting the older specific meaning which was limited to seasonal variability.
The modern understanding of the boom bust bailout cycle is included in modern definitions, but this only occurred once non-reserve fiat was adopted; even back in Thomas Jefferson's day; the failures occurred when more was printed than was actually there and distortions aggregated until crisis. We're specifically talking about the over-subscription, mania, and bust that follows all money printing.
Its impossible to rationally differentiate without having a good detailed reference which is why Adam Smith's 5 volume set (most sets ignore volume 5 but they shouldn't), and Thomas Jefferson's/Coopers related letters are also useful.
Non-reserve fiat leads to collapse from a market economy to non-market socialism, through the assymetric feed from the money-printer driving state-apparatus (unconstrained) to run legitimate producers out of business (profit constrained), sieving resources into few hands. This has been happening since the 1970s, with additional bites at the apple taken during crisis when the banks hold everyone hostage facing systemic contagion from failures they created (perverse incentives).
The connection to socialism/communism is that the plan of concentrating resources has been written about by such groups quite publicly, as the first step prior to crisis engineering and seizing the means of production. While some of these words I use are more modern terms, the meaning remained the same, back then.
The first surviving reference I've found is the paper magazine published ~1895 by the Fabian's under the name "The American Fabian", in one of the first five publications they promote this plan with regards to the NYC real estate market coupled with rent-seeking behavior to create self-sustaining income until all real-estate over time would become under their control and 'could be passed into the common good', so it says,and their membership was tailored towards influential bankers and politicians at that time.
Within a few years (at that time, 1900s) several things occurred, the adoption of the prussian model of centralized schooling, the backroom deals following Jekyl Island leading to the creation of the Fed, and the landmark decision to treat Federal Law as separate to common/state laws with regards to predence (Erie Railroad, 1930s-1940s). One of the historic copies of this magazine I had a chance to examine had writing mentioning the same group influencing the decision towards centralizing authority via the UCC (which first came out around 1870s-1880s iirc. It seemed to be written about the time of publication, but providence is unknown. A good knowledge of detailed history really comes in handy.
The group itself ceased public publication in 1907, with splintering special interest groups forming under varying names since, continually change such names obscuring their origins like what we understand today as cells. 1917 (iirc) also had Lenin proclaiming the best way to destroy the West was through debasement of the currency.
With regards to debasement, it doesn't matter how many entities it passes through, the debasement hits a point where oversubscription of the resources cause the bust cycle failures (which lag), opportunity costs become untethered, and personal property of the individual is stolen through such mechanisms. Demoralizing, Destabilizing, and Crisis, where a new normalization must be found regardless of the cost ("Its the end of the world" - Big Short).
> Crooked handouts don't need fiat printing.
A Crooked handout is fundamentally limited by the reserve of the stable store of value it has access to, when fiat printing is not available it has no rope in the economy to distort it beyond the initial value. You can't take what's not there, and you don't build things in places that will regularly be destroyed.
The government does the money-printing, the crooked handouts induce growing amounts of money-printing, inflation rises. The lagging indicator of disruption leads to chaotic hysteresis requiring perfect-futuresight to plot a safe path forward as you end up being on a cliff where you can only step forward, and on each side you have cascading failure (hyper-inflation->deflation, or direct deflation). The bill always comes due.
This issue is called the Economic Calculation Problem. Mathematical chaos is special, because it can't be predicted ahead of time, small changes dramatically affect the outcomes, and thus no wayfinding a safe path forward can occur since these aren't based on directly measurable indicators in realtime; the survival of those on your boat (which is everyone in the sphere of influence of said currency), depends on random chance heavily skewed against survival as the number of factors involved increase asymmetrically toward failure, similar to falsehoods vs. truth if one were to graph that.
Corruption of those administrating inflationary monetary policy which grows with time, leads to collapse, always, and the scale of that collapse is determined by the underlying amount of resources involved, and the distortions created.
Positive feedback systems are prone to run away with no warning about when that point of no return is. You have exponentially less control to resolve issues the longer you let it run. The baby boomers started this runaway experiment in the 70s.
You can't borrow to spend dollars without any fiat and printing, non-fiat currency has implicit value unlike fiat and you don't see people borrowing gold/silver these days. You'll find proper definitions of the types of money in Mises Theory of Money and Credit (money/money-substitutes). At its core any ambiguous indirection must be followed back to its underlying base or identity that is one or the other; which some people are bad at.
Inflation doesn't improve governmental debt, it creates slow moving distortions that accumulate over time culminating in a tsunami/crisis. Debt is borrowing against the future, or stealing from the future if you go the route of financial dominance. Eventually people will have no purchasing power to feed themselves, and stop having children.
"Socialism", is formally defined by structure in Mises book on Socialism. That book is a worthwhile read, its a professional failure domain map for every way mainstream forms, and variants inevitably fail, even with employ owned/run companies (syndicalism). The mismatch that one often has to come to grips with is the word ownership has been misused in contradictory ways, so much that its lost meaning.
If you've done an in-depth critical study of Communism and its history you'd recognize a number of common tactics used as well, such as the purposeful misuse of language corruption (orwellian doublespeak) which weaponize rhetoric and leverages psychological blindspots but ultimately fail rational/objective comparisons. In other words, the convincing lie.
"If one cannot speak the word, one cannot convey the idea, and thus the idea based in harmful behavior doesn't exist. It is through making people better and more virtuous that the common good can be attained." - Who decides harmful behavior, and to whom, no one can do this objectively and thus *cough bullshit*.
Needless to say, when talking of such things one does need to have a well rounded/working knowledge of the type of people involved to be able to come to sound conclusions.
A lot of the articles are a quagmire of propaganda. If your looking for a good starting point historically on the Communist perspective, reading about the Stasi and then moving backwards from there might be beneficial. Markus Wolfe from the Communist Side (Man without a Face), and John O. Koehler on the American Side as a useful comparison.
A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.