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It’s interesting because capitalism is all about choice and competition. But what if a player is so successful that it can pay to absorb any competitor that pos
by enumjorge 7y ago
It’s interesting because capitalism is all about choice and competition. But what if a player is so successful that it can pay to absorb any competitor that poses a serious threat? I don’t know how capitalism self heals from that.
- druddha 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
- conception 7y agoCapitalism isn't all about choice and competition. Free Markets are. Capitalism is about the means of production being held in private hands - but those private hands still do their best to own all of the means of production and to lock out potential competitors. The two get conflated (free markets and capitalism) but they are different beasts. In fact, you can have a free market socialism (tried semi-successfully by Yugoslavia). But ensuring free markets via regulation is how to keep Capitalism from becoming a Gibson novel.
- haolez 7y agoFree market socialism? How would information about value be propagated? That's usually done via prices and money.
- thiagoharry 7y agoSome options: a) Also using competition, prices and money, but with factories, companies and lands organized by worker's cooperatives, with the profit shared according with some logic not based in mere property. b) Using only prices and money while keeping updated data about production and consumption, and updating prices based in these data. Perhaps easier with modern technology than in the past. The information about these things can propagate in wires and communication means like the other kind of information that the society needs.
- haolez 7y agoI think that a) already happens when a company shares its profits with the workforce. Mere competition will force the competitors of such a company to do that as well to attract talent. Item b) sounds like capitalism and blockchain to me :) About item c), heuristics and politics don't go well together, according to my intuition. But these are just my opinions. This is a fascinating topic.
- haolez 7y agoThere were some nasty edits from the parent
- andrepd 7y agoPrecisely. "Prices and money" is the "free market" part. The "socialism" part means "collective/social ownership of companies and means of production".
- rapnie 7y agoDo you have a good read of free markets? I often see them pop up in discussions defending capitalism, and always got the idea they are some kind of utopia in the way they were presented.
- jkarneges 7y agoIndeed. And FB retaining Instagram/Whatsapp apps+branding effectively squashes future "unbundling" attempts. The way I look at it, if not even Google can beat FB at personal social networking (Google+), then FB has a monopoly and this is not a free market. Sure, anyone is free to start a startup and try to do what FB does, but I mean... I suspect the only reason the government hasn't gotten involved in this matter yet is because FB offers seemingly non-essential service. A different situation than Microsoft and browsers.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoMy grandparents’ generation and my parents’ generation aren’t about to invest any effort into learning a new app. They’re happy with Whatsapp, it was the first to do what it needed to do easily, and unless a new app offers a compelling new feature, they’re not going to find it worth their time to learn it. Unfortunately, they might not understand privacy concerns, but even if they did, they don’t have the language fluency or technical capacity to verify the claims of security.
- Seenso 7y ago> It’s interesting because capitalism is all about choice and competition. But what if a player is so successful that it can pay to absorb any competitor that poses a serious threat? I don’t know how capitalism self heals from that. Capitalism is not naturally stable and it needs regulation to work to the benefit of most people. Without that, the capitalists work to destroy capitalism in order to benefit themselves.
- ohthehugemanate 7y agoIt doesn't, that's one of the classic examples of when a natural market is not a free market. Even in its original definition, Adam Smith antipicipated a role for government to intervene to prevent just such situations.