The meaning of a "cost-saving" economy

The big story of the economy so far this year is cost-saving. Disney recently announced it was cutting 7,000 jobs and slashing $5.5 billion in costs, and its stock price went up at the news. Tons of tech companies are doing massive layoffs to cut costs.

Cost-saving is obviously bad for workers, because it means they lose their jobs. But it isn’t just bad for workers—it’s also bad for the products and services themselves, and for consumers who rely on it. There’s a fantasy that capitalist corporations have, that they can cut costs and still provide the same value to customers. It’s impossible, but capitalism requires belief in impossible things to keep itself going.

Even hospitals have become captured by this cost-saving ideology. A hospital in Tennessee outsourced the labor in its emergency room to American Physician Partners, a medical staffing company owned by private equity investors. (Finance ghouls love to use the word “partners.” It makes things sound nice). Most of the workers in this staffing company are not actual doctors, but nurse practitioners and physician assistants, known as “midlevel practitioners.”

That’s right folks—the ER, the place where people go when they have, you know, emergencies, is being worked by “midlevel practioners.” This seems like the worst possible place to put midlevel workers—but from the perspective of a bullshit staffing company owned by a private equity company, which solely wants to make money, it makes perfect sense. Midlevel workers can keep the ER open, and generate more profit by doing so, because they require far lower pay than, you know, actual doctors.

Who loses in this scenario? Anyone who goes to the ER and needs help, you know, not dying. But you living or dying doesn’t really matter to the private equity company that sells labor to the hospital—all that matters is that the workers in the ER are cheap, and cheap labor equals higher profits. You dying isn’t part of the equation.

I suppose they would prefer that you not die because if you stay alive you can return as a repeat customer. But as society collapses, there will be no shortage of people going to the ER, so customers will never run out.

Having ERs run by midlevel workers—instead of actual doctors—is of course absurd and impossible. But again—believing impossible, absurd things is necessary to keep capitalism functioning during these final stages. This is just one of the more striking examples.

It goes along with this general feeling in society that everything is getting worse. And this isn’t just a feeling or a suspicion—it is true! Every ounce of value is being sucked out of the husk of society so that the capitalist class can enrich itself before everything finally collapses for good. They want to achieve a delicate balance of keeping the social apparatus up and running long enough to keep extracting value from the mass of people. This means propping everything up with as little support as possible—everything is just like 1% better than the absolute worst it could possibly be.

This is all magnified by the attempt to reopen society after it closed during the pandemic. So many workers were laid off, and then everything opened up again, but nobody was working anywhere. So workers had to be hired quickly so that society could start again. It didn’t really matter if the workers were qualified to do their jobs—they just needed bodies to put in places so that society could restart.

So as society continues struggling to reopen, even years after the pandemic, it still doesn’t feel right. Nothing works the way it used to. Why? Because the people who own the country don’t want it to run the way it should—they just need it to limp along a little bit longer so they can keep sucking value from it. Society will never return to how it was before the pandemic, it will just keep being the husk that it is now, because that’s all that the elites want or need it to be.