Corporate Greed (Part 17 of 17): What falls by the tracks (#498)

The Texas State Capitol rises from its hill in Austin with quiet authority. Its pink granite dome glowing warmly in the sun. It looks permanent. Inevitable. As if it has always been there.

But the stone tells a longer story.

The Journey of Value

The granite that built the Capitol came from Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country, quarried from Granite Mountain near Marble Falls.

It was cut, shaped, and hauled east by rail in the 1880s. Nearly 190,000 cubic feet of stone, each block weighing hundreds of pounds.

The land was donated. Much of the labor was unpaid prison labor. The rail cars rattled along narrow-gauge tracks toward Austin, carrying raw value away from where it was created.

Even then, the economics were clear:

If a block fell from the train, it was cheaper to quarry another than to retrieve it.

The stone was free. The system demanded forward motion.

And so, the granite fell.

What Was Left Behind

To this day, large blocks of Texas pink granite lie beside old rail lines between Burnet and Austin. Cracked, weathered, half-hidden by grass and time. They were never recovered. Not because they lacked value, but because retrieving them did not serve the larger machinery of progress.

These abandoned stones were not accidents.

They were the predictable byproduct of scale.

When systems grow large enough, individual losses no longer matter. A fallen block becomes rounding error. A discarded piece of craftsmanship becomes irrelevant.

The rail line moved on.

From Stone to Power

Far from the quarry, the granite reappeared. Polished, elevated, monumental. What began as land and labor was transformed into authority.

The Capitol dome does not show the quarry. It does not show the prison labor. It does not show the stones left behind.

Distance has erased origin.

Refinement has erased cost.

This is how consolidation works.

Value extracted from many places is gathered into structures that appear inevitable and beyond question.

The Pattern Has Not Changed

This is not just a story about granite or railroads.

It is the same pattern we see today:

• When independent veterinary practices are acquired, standardized, and absorbed.

• When local decision-making is replaced by distant management.

• When care, judgment, and relationships are treated as inefficiencies.

• When communities lose services while balance sheets grow stronger.

  
  

What falls by the tracks now is not stone, but people. Professions. Trust.

Corporate greed does not need malice.

It thrives on indifference.

It relies on scale to make loss invisible.

The Language of Inevitability

Corporate greed rarely announces itself as greed.

• It calls itself efficiency.

• It calls itself optimization.

• It calls itself progress.

The train cannot stop. The margins are too tight. The system must move forward.

But progress that measures only what arrives, and not what is left behind, is not progress at all.

It is extraction with better language.

Lessons in Pink Granite

The scattered blocks of Texas pink granite still resting beside old rail corridors offer a quiet warning.

They remind us that:

• Value is created locally but often claimed elsewhere.

• Loss is real even when it does not appear on a spreadsheet.

• What is abandoned is rarely worthless, only inconvenient.

We should pay attention to what falls by the tracks.

Because when the stones are gone, and the profession is hollowed out, and the communities are diminished, the structures built from their labor will still stand.

Polished, impressive, and silent about the cost.

And by then, the train will already be far down the line.

Rick’s Commentary

This 17-part series on corporate greed began with questions about ownership, transparency, and trust. It moved through balance sheets, corporate structures, language, and incentives. Along the way, the details changed - countries, companies, professions - but the pattern did not.

Again and again, I find myself returning to the same uncomfortable truth:

When systems grow large enough, responsibility becomes diffuse, and loss becomes easy to ignore.

What is taken is justified as progress.

What is left behind is dismissed as inefficiency.

The scattered blocks of Texas pink granite are not an anomaly.

They are a metaphor for how modern institutions are built. Quietly, incrementally, and at a distance from their consequences.

If this 17-part series on corporate greed has a purpose, it is not to argue that all scale is bad, or that all corporations are wrong.

It is to insist that we look honestly at what consolidation costs, who pays those costs, and how easily those costs disappear from view.

What falls by the tracks always matters.

Even when the train keeps moving.

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