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I think the key distinction is capitalism vs corporatism. Corporatism is feudalism wearing a capitalist mask. The elite companies in the top do operate in a fre

• int_19h 8y ago
  Capitalism is simply the private ownership (including ability to transfer) the means of production. This is still true of the corporatist variety - unlike feudal fiefs, corporations can be bought and sold, and that makes all the difference. The only way for a feudal to aggregate more power is to go to war with other feudals for more lands, because a fief is land tenure, not property. In capitalism, because capital is property, it can be aggregated by buying it, and the more you aggregate, the more powerful you become, letting you acquire more capital etc - a positive feedback loop which means that monopolies are inevitable in pure unregulated capitalism. Regulation is orthogonal to all that, so long as it does not interfere with the ability to aggregate capital. You can tax the corporations heavily, you can impose various safety standards on them, you can have consumer rights commissions etc - it makes it harder for them to make money from the capital that they own, but it doesn't change the fundamental equation of capital -> money -> more capital, and therefore the result is still capitalism. The only way you can stop this cycle is by imposing a limit on how much capital can be held in one hands.
  • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    Artificially limiting the 'means of production' (which is such an increasingly inappropriate and dated concept to use for these sort of discussions) is precisely the issue. Imagine a kingdom where a king created rules that, in effect, named exactly one black smith owning [puppet], one tavern owning [puppet], one brothel owning [puppet], etc. And these individuals were free to buy, sell, and trade these businesses so long as the transactions remained within the regulations of the king. That's not capitalism, not even a little. And that is really the issue. The further you limit the ability of people to engage the market (as buyer and seller) the further away you move from capitalism. And that is precisely what our current system is doing. Repeating the same example just because it's so stupefying. In most places in America today you cannot legally setup a lemonade stand and start selling lemonade on your own property. We're creating a culture of passive consumers driven by extreme regulations against everything except such!
    • int_19h 8y ago
      We don't have a problem with monopolization of lemonade stands, though. But we do have a problems with large corporations monopolizing their respective markets, and they are doing that not because they are granted said monopoly from up above, but because they are able to consolidate it. Limiting the amount of capital one can own is not equivalent to your scheme, by the way. The rule isn't that only one guy can own a tavern, or that there can only be one tavern - the rule is that one guy cannot own more than one tavern (just as an example - I don't think that's the level at which we should actually cap capital).
      • TangoTrotFox 8y ago
        The issues are intrinsically connected. People don't just start out e.g. going from nothing to building let's say a telecoms company. Entrepreneurship and creating businesses is a cycle of growth. For instance Bezos' first 'gig' followed a summer of work at McDonalds, which he hated. The next summer he setup a week long education camp for younger kids. He only got a dozen or so signups, but he probably made more from those signups than he did in last year's work at McDonalds. When you start making entrepreneurship difficult from the bottom up, you're going to end up with a really distorted picture of capitalism at the top since you're going to have some sort of strange bias in the companies represented. And this is where I think corporatism excels. There are now just an immense number of rules and laws that are all increasingly esoteric even to operate quite simple businesses. And that's before you get into the countless fees and costs the government demands before you've even sold your first product. In other words when you kill off entrepreneurship and start moving away from capitalism, you invariably head towards corporatism which is itself headed much closer to feudalism than capitalism. As for the king example, this was relating to the feudalism -> capitalism -> corporatism -> feudalism loop, not your specific suggestion. As for your suggestion, there are two big issues. The first is the same as discussed here. Capitalism and competition is a growth system. The reason e.g. Elon Musk was able to create a competitive rocket and vehicle company was because he earned hundreds of millions of dollars in another venture. No individual has any personal need for hundreds of millions of dollars, but it is strictly required if this individual wishes to engage in large scale ventures - the sort of which stand to massively improve society. The second issue is probably the bigger point. We already have countless laws, on the order of thousands of pages, of laws relating to competition, anticompetitive behavior, restrictions on mergers and acquisitions, etc. These were all geared minimizing anti-competitive ownership. But the general rule in a corporatist society holds true. We have the FTC approve mergers between e.g. AT&T/Time Warner/Charter while rejecting mergers between far smaller companies that could eventually become the competitors for these sort of behemoths that increasingly stand above the law, and perhaps even above government. In other words, write the laws and expect to see you and I only be able to own e.g. one tavern. But expect to see the king's friends somehow manage to own thousands. Corporatism in a nutshell.