[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!
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?
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.
“Capitalism isn’t the problem, THIS is”
* points to the main thing capitalism does *
Look, non-sterile surgical procedures are perfectly safe. But wow, those rampant and definitely unrelated fatal infections sure are a bummer, huh?
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.
Ummm…except that this IS capitalism. It’s just completely unregulated capitalism…which is capitalism in its truest form. If “the free market” was given complete autonomy to regulate itself…monopolies are always the inevitable outcome.
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.
You’re complaining about accumulation of power/wealth and how it ends up being abused by the powerful/wealthy. That’s one of the main features of unregulated capitalism
The key word is unregulated. Why does it have to be unregulated?
It was regulated. They captured the regulators. That’s the whole point. It could never have gone any other way. Capitalism breeds greed. In everyone. And when a greedy person sees another person doing something highly immoral and abusive to their customers, they don’t think, “my God! We have to stop it!”
They think, “that’s a good idea. How can I get MINE?”
Because capitalists don’t like regulations? When you let corporations become the sole driver of the economy, some of them get really big, so big they can easily buy out the people who are supposed to regulate the market.
Why do you think all companies are bending the knee and ass kissing trump? Because you get what you want when you bribe him enough.
Also isn’t lobbying legal in the US? It’s almost like the country was made by capitalists assholes to make it easy to subvert regulations.
The US was founded by the rich for the rich. Anything else is just convenient propaganda to convince the masses otherwise.
I hear ya, just seems like one of those throwing the baby away with the bathwater things.
The likelyhood of implementing market regulations is plausible vs implementing full communism, which will never happen.
We can make progressive steps towards fixing our system and I don’t want to give up.
The guy in the video is literally discussing the removal of regulations though? Are you arguegreeing right now?
Name an economic system that doesn’t eventually funnel money to the top. Not one person has answered that on lemmy, but it sounds like you can!
Lol, you’re pointing to a time when regulation was still helping keep shit up, completely discounting the fact that we had these same issues before the regulations were in place. We had these kinds of monopolies before (Ma Bell, Standard oil, etc), there was just a handful of decades where the government was trying to keep them from going full capitalism, which they’re now able to do.
Capitalism is the problem, you just don’t see the problem because you’ve seen what it’s like when governments reign in corporations. But without something keeping a book on the neck of the corpos, this is what we get
“capitalism is not the problem. The problem is capital and it accumulation.”
Yeah. Great propaganda bro.
What are you talking about? Capitalism is a wonderful system that works perfectly fine!
…as long as there are established guardrails that hamstring nearly every facet of it. Perfection!
Same as a cow, without fence them come shit in you r bed without remorse.
Tell us about your economic system that doesn’t eventually funnel money to the top. To date, not a single person on lemmy has answered that question.
Depends on your definition of funneling money to the top. You need a decentralized economic system designed not to behave like late stage capitalism.
One example of this is Parecon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
Honestly though, most of our problems are not driven by our economic system so much as our culture. You have to face that just about everyone worships greed whether they like to admit it or not.
In the US it is extremely pronounced and we even have idolized phrases about it like “fuck you money”. Where you have enough money that you can do whatever you want and you no longer have to follow the rules.
There is obvious a problem with our culture, but it is not just the US. Fascism is pretty much everywhere and even the most progressive countries still have huge wealth gaps that are always slowly widening.
Democracies cannot exist with large wealth gaps unless the wealth is aggressively kept out of politics. This is extremely hard and that is why the majority of all policies in all governments all over the world are driven by corporations.
There’s not one as long as cluster B personality disorders exist and are allowed in positions of power.
Communism is supposed to be what you’re describing, but it only works on paper.
Why does it have to be a single economic system? The answer isn’t an existing economic system because economic systems are broken from the jump. The answer is a constantly evolving system, moving toward the betterment of all, not the betterment of the few. Capitalism may have been the economic system for the Industrial Revolution/subsequent time—I think that’s up for debate, but any pro capitalist will tell you it’s great for innovation (which, nah, but sure let them have it). But after the period in which capitalism helped people progress, its time was over. We should have moved past it to keep it from getting corrupted. But we haven’t and look where we are now
That is a total non-answer, zero proposals, zero meat on the bone. So, still, no one has answered the question.
That’s easy! A post scarcity society where everyone’s basic needs are fulfilled and working is fully optional. Somehow we also solved religious and ideological differences, greed, fully renewable and unlimited energy and all the other things too.
Op… I don’t feel like I want to say the same thing as others but you realize capitalism causes monopolies .?
And as a 2nd point Ive not seen mentioned because it’s slightly off topic but.
Capitalism encourages unsustainability.
By it’s very nature there is no end goal but growth for the sake of growth.
This can’t happen forever. You understand that right?
We live on a planet with finite resources. And a breaking point for pollution that many believe has already been met.
Capitalism WILL kill this entire planet and everyone on it.
It’s not a theory or a prediction.
It’s absolute. Again, by its very nature, the goals of capitalism is to cut corners to keep producing. To constantly expand. To reduce production costs constantly. (Usually in the form of labor).
Which is not sustainable.
This is why billionaires want more babies. To feed the capitalism machine.
But what we really should be doing is celebrating lower birth rates. We don’t need more humans to be slaves.
We need less humans. And sustainable economies. Sustainable lifestyles.
Machines have reduced the need for human labor a hundred fold. And increased human production by quite a lot. Yet humans are still paid low wages.
Capitalism will continue to exploit human labor.
The more of us there are, the lower value we have.
You ever have a job where they make it clear how replaceable you are? I have. And there are a lot of jobs like that.
True communism is the only system that will save us. Not Russia fake communism. Not China authoritarian fake communism.
I mean legit actual real communism. Where the workers own the companies. Not billionaires.
Why do people believe those men deserve to hoard?I don’t get it. Just watch videos of those losers. They aren’t great men. They don’t deserve to hoard the wealth. They are rich from harming others. Exploiting. Funding wars and politicians in other countries and our own that allow them to keep exploiting.
Literally. Not figuratively. We have allowed the worst of humanity to take control.This has to stop.
True communism or something like it, is the only sustainable system that will save humanity and the planet.
I feel like you’re missing the economic system vs. the government system. Those are two separate entities that must be controlled for.
Mu point here is that capitalism is a fucking mess, with no government controls. Of course it is! As with any economic system.
Uh… Government controls the economic system by laws and enforcement of said laws.
Well yeah any economic system requires government oversight to be effective but that’s because there isn’t really a decoupling of government and economics. Our current governments around the world are primarily representative democratic nation states and they are neoliberal capitalist institutions. These are not separate, both have evolved alongside each other and we are currently seeing them crack under pressure together. There is no point in making this distinction at the macro level.
politics and economy are not separate worlds. capital, monopoly or not, is political power greater than any vote or government seat
what sense does it make to say you’ll keep the ruling class in check while letting them keep their power?
can you make a benevolent mafia by taxing the racket and breaking up mafia monopolies?
Economics, as an intellectual discipline, is closer to theology than physics. Much like religion being arbitrary rules cherry picked from schizophrenic Bronze Age fan fiction, current economic models are built as narratives manufactured to justify the existence, position, and legitimacy of a ruling class. Finance is merely mythology shrouded in enough mathematic formulas provide the appearance of a natural, universal legitimacy.
Capitalism is absolutely the problem, but I don’t consider replacing it with something else, or eliminating it to be a viable response. My biggest problem with capitalism, and all economic systems, is the lack of consent. Capitalism should be tolerated only when conducted by those who have actively chosen to be exposed to it. Let them play in an air tight bubble where they have to recycle their competitively manufactured farts.
Every example you give is driven by capitalism.
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.
If the goal is to make a profit for private owners, you are going to get this shit eventually. Regulating the fuck out of it might make it feel better but only in comparison.
We could regulate a system where the workers own the means of production too.
But we should be making things that last forever, protect our planet, etc. Profit is antithetical to sustaining life so, advocating for that sounds insane.
So, what’s your solution? I am listening.
If you want to end Capitalism, you would need to get rid of the stock market and ban financial shareholding entirely. Make investing illegal, and you would remove the primary mechanism for worker exploitation.
That sounds like regulation
There’s nothing wrong with regulating the economy.
Thanks Chicago School of Economics you neoliberal bastards, “monopolies are efficient” my ass.
They’re efficient at a couple things. None of the things are good things unfortunately.
Maybe we are focusing on the wrong places. Maybe we should be burning down schools of economics. Burn down every building that teaches it. Maybe that would help.
Chicago School generally isn’t in favor of monopolies, and they opposed the to big to fail concept that is a big reason we are in this mess.
this is why I subscribe to NOTHING and I buy NOTHING except for shit to literally keep me alive, or to repair things I already own.
never been more physically fit, have tons of new skills from guitar to fixing my appliances.
