One of the most shocking statistics from the reading is that over the span of 5 years, only $2 trillion are spent on research and development, and $20 trillion were spent in companies merging. This is shocking because it maintains a capitalist country stagnant when it comes to innovation. This leads me to my next point, which is the problem with companies prioritizing meaning and essentially turning a market into a monopoly. This is one of the most concerning facts, because when a company monopolizes a market, they have more control over the price of that market. The goal of capitalism at some point was that people would innovate new things in the pursuit of self interest, but based on the last couple of decades, its seems as though the priority of the wealthy is to get even wealthier by finding gray ares to get more tax cuts and make more profit, and not innovate anything new.

The capitalist have a certain pattern that they maintain in order to produce more money and maintain it. We have learned about the diagram M-C-M’ where M stands for money, and C for commodities. To understand hoe the wealth is kept and produced, we must understand this diagram. Stating with the first M, the capitalist have a great amount of money enough to buy a product, or raw materials, to then turn it into an item that has the potential to be sold at a higher price. This is where we now explore C, during this phase, it’s important to understand value surplus, because this is where the worker aids the transformation of the raw materials or product, and adds value to it. In exchange the worker gets payed but only minimal compared to the value that was provided, because the rest of this value is where the capitalist makes their “cut”. Lastly, M’ is M+m, the capitalist makes back their initial investment plus the “cut” that was made during the C phase.