The real rule of capitalism — extract maximum value at minimum cost; and why it fails on a breath™

Strip the euphemisms and the whole engine is four words: extract maximum value at minimum cost. That's not an insult; it's the honest spec, the thing every mission statement dresses up. And for widgets it works — competition, allocation, the phone in your hand (the steelman stays; the house isn't anti-market, it's anti-lie). It fails the instant the “cost” you're minimizing is a human breath. You cannot minimize the cost of a person's air, water, insulin, or rest without costing them the breath itself — the savings is the harm; the efficiency is the funeral. That's where he breaks it, and he breaks it on his own breath: a body the market priced at a $1,400 check is the living proof that a breath was never a line item. The fix isn't burning the market down (diagnosis, not fists); it's fencing the floor off from the extraction — some costs are people, and people don't go on the “minimize” side of the ledger. Kin: if your worker's on food stamps you failed, the minimum floor, the dignity floor, corporations-own-us. (His coin — machine's read, refine to his.)