The Old Sageof Finance

Investors rarely see what their dividend actually does. People buy a share, a fund, an ETF — and the money flows into corporations that, with that capital, go and acquire rights: water rights, land rights, breweries, springs, distribution networks. The shareholder sees a number on a screen. The village a thousand kilometers away sees a fence around its well.

I have seen this with my own eyes. In Ghana, trucks deliver drinking water in small plastic sachets — 225 ml at a time — printed with the logo of a global beverage corporation. The pattern is the same everywhere: instead of teaching people to dig a well and own their own water, the structure makes them lifelong customers of bottled portions. And because there is no recycling culture, that plastic ends up on roads, in rivers, in the sea. The 'service' creates dependency and waste in the same gesture.

The same pattern played out in Slovenia when our breweries were acquired by foreign capital. On paper it was a 'brewery sale'. In practice it was a transfer of water sources — the most valuable thing under those buildings was never the beer recipe; it was the spring.

I am not accusing any single person. I am pointing at a structure — capitalism wrapped as a dividend, where the shareholder is shielded by abstraction from what the corporation is actually doing with the money. That distance is not innocent. It is the mechanism.

LOVE's answer is simple, almost boring: invest only in things you can name, visit, and look in the eye. A neighbor's farm. A local workshop. A well that stays a well. Slowly, slowly — so the wheel for the cottage stays in the village, and no fence ever appears around someone else's water.

— Miha, founder of LOVE · structural critique, not personal accusation