[American biased post, because that’s what I know and where I am]
Been screaming that capitalism is not the problem you are experiencing. Monopolies, or more to the point, cartels, have exploded in scope over the past 40-years. Think of a company you hate, a company that’s fucking you over, a company that’s fucking us ALL over. Bet they fit the bill.
Hate your job at Lowe’s? Go to Home Depot! wait… There’s a great family-owned, local hardware store, but I can’t afford to shop there.
Walgreens piss you off? Just go to CVS! well damn… New local pharmacy chain is really nice! They can’t take my insurance.
If you’re under 40, or maybe even under 50, I cannot relate how alien this all is, the words fail me. If you’re in your 20s or 30s, it’s easy to think it was always like this. Oh hell no it was not.
Along with allowing corporations unlimited political “speech”, i.e. campaign contributions, the proliferation of cartels will go down in history as America’s failing point. (Basically the same thing?)
News like the current entertainment mergers didn’t fucking happen. And here on lemmy we’re talking, with a straight face, about the ups and downs of the Netflix/Warner Bros./HBO merger. And if you’ll remember, Warner Bros./Time Warner/AOL was the largest merger in US history!
Competitive human nature and tribalism are the problem.
If something that gives a competitive advantage can be done, someone will do it regardless of the negative consequences (often inflicted upon others).
and WHAT is the Problem? Have you considered how it relates back to Capitalism, how money equals power and money can proliferate on its own by using your power?
No.
Capitalism IS the problem.
Capitalism is still the problem. This is a aymptom of that problem
Not just a symptom, basically the goal everyone is trying to reach, it’s like the thing to do, the only metric.
Neoliberals didn’t do this solo.
Its a failure of government and a failure of culture not a result of the economic system.
Destinction without difference. Government and economic culture is part of the economic system.
Any system, in which the denizens of that system exhibit greed and selfishness, is likely going to produce similar problems. I really don’t think people are accurate about the feeling that “Obtaining and hoarding valuable things” is an act borne out of the laws of our current society.
I really don’t think it’s just “economic culture” as you’ve described.
I really don’t think it’s just “economic culture” as you’ve described.
I didn’t say it is just economic culture that is the issue here…
I really don’t think people are accurate about the feeling that “Obtaining and hoarding valuable things” is an act borne out of the laws of our current society.
Also true, but what is? Is your point that it is human nature? I would disagree there, humans have the capacity of acting against greed and selfishness. Question is why they are so often acting greedy and selfish then?
My answer would be two options with both apply to some degree, and there might be more:
- Resources are scarce and distributed non equally. So hoarding gives power over others
- The system incentivizes greedy behavior, by it’s structure and rules. Either by actively, by giving greedy people direct rewards, or passively by not punishing greedy behavior.
Other ideas?
The point being, it’s pretty specifically American culture. Disregard politics, and only obsess over it when enraged about an issue. Hate on anything that might benefit people you don’t know.
There are millions of humans on this planet to which those behaviors are bafflingly mad. Many of those places essentially operate under capitalist structure, with rules and safeguards in place to ensure government stays responsible for basic safety and competition remains fair. The battle to keep that structure stable is constant, but gets easier when people at all levels care about it.
Basically, I couldn’t claim capitalism is perfect, but whether replacing the system or not, you need to address the greedy human culture beneath it.
system incentivizes greedy behavior
Got one that doesn’t? And I don’t mean communism in small tribes. I need something to rule 10’s of millions.
these things are linked you know? the failure of one shows the failure of the others
No. The same government in any other economic system would produce similarly worse outcomes. We can see its not related to the economic system by looking around the world at all the capitalist economies without these issues.
America has these monopolies because they intentional chose to ignore the law and not break them up. The culture of the people in government was and still is rotten.
The real problem is people. It doesn’t matter which system you live under greedy shitty people will find every loophole they can to increase their own wealth especially if the consequences aren’t seen or felt. It’s not being evil it’s just how people are.
if your instinct is to blame human nature, you are wrong. i mean, not wrong that human nature is flawed, but wrong in that you are effectively arguing there can never be a solution to anything.
solving problems requires tackling the human element. and often times means holding people accountable.
I didn’t mean to imply that there can’t be solutions, only that there can’t be solutions that don’t account for most people being selfish assholes.
Oh! then we agree, unregulated capitalism was very dumb.
There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.
It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.
So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.
In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.
To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.
If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.
Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).
It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.
If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?
Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.
Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.
There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.
Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?
Everything in the post screams unfettered, unregulated capitalism as the underlying cause since it’s the system that allows and promotes this behavior.
Also as a 40+ year old, I can remember that this has been the case too since I remember the wal-marts moving in and killing every local business with everyone smiling about cheap Chinese goods. Same as it ever was.
Well, unfettered China will soon take over, since they don’t have the same issues.
I’m not even a China shill, I was very critical of China until.
-
I got to see reports from my boss, his son, and some YouTube videos on how they are actually advancing, and how decent their society is becoming.
-
I see how awful our countries are in general. (except Finland, Denmark, Norway, etc).
-
Realize that they are wimning regardless, there’s no way we are overcoming their momentum. Say what you will about how good some country is, but this is no good! One country rulling the world is terrible, a recipe for the end times.
-
The bitch is that we need to not only overcome capitalism and the right, but also the brand of liberal consultant that makes 6 figures a year blaming bad actors in defense of the system that makes them.
Both Capitalism and Monopolies are the problem
I would argue that capitalist monopolies are the problem.
There are examples where a “monopoly” has 100% of the market and they do a good job, usually in non-profit driven contexts. To provide an example: there’s only one organization in pretty much any given area, that handles extinguishing fires. Usually called the fire department, and it’s run by the local body of government in a monopoly context.
They still do a great job, but there’s no competition in fire fighting.
They’re not inherently profit driven.
Also, hats off to the firefighters out there, you guys are awesome. Anyways, back to my point.
There are good organizations that operate a monopoly in their service segment. They’re just typically owned and operated by a democratically elected government. Of the people, for the people, by the people.
Any monopoly that is profit driven, especially any that are capitalistic, will succumb to enshittification, 100% of the time, it’s just a matter of when it happens. The only time that it is possible to not have that happen, is in privately owned corporations, which are rare… But the leadership believes in improving the product more than profiteering. But on a long enough time line, that will also fail because inevitably someone will buy the company or inherit it, and they will want to maximize their profits over everything.
It will always happen when things are privately held, and especially if they’re publicly traded.
Small local businesses fuck over their employees too. Capitalism incentives it. It also incentives monopolies. And it seems when the wealth disparity gets large enough, it captures government and starts transforming into fascism.
But that is the inevitable outcome of capitalism.
It’s like saying “the problem isn’t kittens, it’s cats”.It’s more like saying “the problem isn’t the several aggressive madmen with loaded guns shooting at you, it’s when the bullet hits you that’s the problem”.
Sort of.
I was trying to highlight the clear inevitable outcome, rather than highlight who to blame.
The fundamental argument here is that it’s not the system which incentivizes abusers that is the problem but rather the abusers who exploit the system. Sure, we can have another working class revolution, keep capitalism around and build institutions that keep exploitation in check but given enough time those with capital and the power that it represents will chip away at those institutions, continuing the cycle and harming people in the process.
This would happen under any system since power-hungry narcissists are everywhere, so sooner or later every society would run into these issues. My statement is not meant to defend capitalism but to rather state the question on how to prevent or diminish these kind of influences from power-hungry people, independent of the underlying economic system.
a system that does not account for abuse will fail. but let’s not be so defeatist. society may go in cycles of rise and decline. we just have to stretch the rise and force the reset early enough to mitigate the harm. and while what comes after the next revolution may fail eventually, the good times should be fought for none the less. and be ever vigilant to remind those whom we entrust power that the leviathan sleeps as long as it’s cared for.
Competition, especially free market competition is one of the enemies of capitalism.
Fortunately for capitalists in a liberalised (unregulated) market it’s not too hard to build up market power somewhere in the supply chain, and squeeze out, or effectively force the competition into franchise.
Almost unavoidable economies of scale in industries like banking are huge problem, that concentrates critical market power and drives out competition under the guise of plausible investor friendly sounding shit like “risk premia”, “international competitiveness”, “labour cost efficiency”. Directed credit, sectoral and regional should be part of being a bank, the banks have been given responsibility for running the economy, but not made accountable for it. That’s why they can get away with investing in real estate bubbles instead of productive industry.
FDR was one of the last USA leaders who seemed to understand the role of banks - sadly that was a long time ago and those ideas seem to be long forgotten.
Saying capitalism isn’t the problem but monopolies are is like saying a cancerous tumor isn’t the problem, but the aggressive metastasis is.
“Stop saying he was killed by a gun! It was the blood loss that did him in!”
Bullets don’t kill people! It’s the hydrostatic shock caused by Newtonian forces that is the real villain!
God damn physics ruining everything.
It wasn’t capitalism that that said bail out large companies when they make bad investments. It wasn’t capitalism that said hand out free loans to any company who asks during covid. It’s not capitalism that prohibited community based ISPs.
Alright. What was it then?
Government policy.
Corporate socialism. In real capitalism there would be no government bailouts.
It’s still a shit economic system, but it’s mostly shit because shitty people worm their way to the top. Same with every instance of communism or socialism.
“that’s not real capitalism” now, huh?
You call it “socialism” because it’s failing, but there isn’t anything socialist about it; it’s just late stage capitalism. Capitalism is a system of concentrating power, and this is what happens when you concentrate power.
It wasn’t capitalism in the same way that “it wasn’t real communism”.
Sure, I guess maybe, but it’s the inevitable outcome of the processes that define capitalism. Just as all kittens become cats, this is what all capitalism becomes.
