From an objective point of view, capitalism is little more than an elaborate pyramid scheme. For a business to justify itself, it must make profit. That is, its revenues must be greater than its expenditures. That is, the people at the top (those that identify as owners) must make more than those at the bottom (those that identify as workers). That includes any payments to others for materials or contracts. Thus, in a perfect capitalist economy where all businesses are viable, money must always trickle up and never down. The result is that there must always be growing inflation because those at the bottom who are greater in number and trying to survive will always be "running to stand still" while those at the top slowly pull away. To cover the shortfall of that "pulling away", more money must be added to the economy resulting in every unit of money having less purchasing power.
Beyond this, however, as more money is pulled out of the economy, the class hierarchy will imply that those at the very bottom will have less and less, and have to rely more and more on help from other sources (predominantly government) in order to get by. This is where the "rules are rules" ruthlessness of private corporations steps in. Whereas the government can afford (in theory) to allow us to pay our debts back slowly (because a government relies on investments in its people en masse, corporations have no such qualms because their own social responsibility is to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. Recently, it came to the public's attention that British Gas is breaking into the houses of the poor in order to install prepayment meters.
For example:
As one debt collector trainer cheerily enlightened a new recruit during the Times investigation into the practice: “That person could tell you that their entire family of 50 were in a horrific aeroplane crash and were the sole survivor, and we’d still be saying: that’s a shame, but we are changing your meter.”
There is a certain inevitability that one can see coming closer and closer on the horizon, namely the advent of "pitchfork capitalism" when so many people are poor and cannot survive within the body of laws that favour oppression by the wealthy that they will say "to hell with your rules, we're coming for what is rightfully ours". This is not a call to arms, but an observation that if no private company is willing to support the growing numbers of poor people that are living ever-more desperately due to increasing costs that are constantly being "passed on to the consumer", then either the government covers everything (not happening) or people will start to die. And when people have nothing left to lose, all bets are off.
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