Everytime I look at small problems or big global problems, if you follow the money trail, it all leads to some billionaire who is either working towards increasing their wealth or protecting their wealth from decreasing.
Everything from politics, climate change, workers rights, democratic government, technology, land rights, human rights can all be rendered down to people fighting another group of people who defend the rights of a billionaire to keep their wealth or to expand their control.
If humanity got rid of or outlawed the notion of any one individual owning far too much money than they could ever possibly spend in a lifetime, we could free up so much wealth and energy to do other things like save ourselves from climate change.
I think humanity seems to have this need to centralize everything with just a few people. If billionaires are so bad, then people should not use the services that billionaires create and get rich off of and should decentralize, so things like Walmart should not exist and local grocery stores should exist. People should not use things like Amazon in favor of trading more peer to peer, but that’s less convenient.
Centralization is not the problem. Centralization is one of the keys to efficiency. Grocery stores are a centralized solution. Decentralization of the food supply would mean we each grow our own food in our back yards. (Even that is centralization… True decentralization, we would forage for food in the wild, rather than growing it in a dedicated place near our homes)
The problem comes not when we centralized, but when the store owner decided to take a share disproportionate to the value he provides. When the efficiency of his operation saves production costs, but those savings never reach back to workers or consumers.
The next problem comes when he acquires enough power in the marketplace that he can dictate terms without worrying about losing market share.
The solution is to dictate back to him a “level of futility.” A level at which any future gains are confiscated, so there is no benefit for squeezing workers and consumers any tighter. A confiscatory top-tier tax bracket was the solution to the Robber Barons of the industrial revolution. Abandoning that control has been an unmitigated disaster.
From what I have read, the profit of like a grocery store is something like 2%.