[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!
Nonsense, if companies took the loss from 2008 many banks and PE wouldn’t exist right now. A key part of capitalism is companies failing from bad investments, entropy, or other factors. You need the bust to create the boom.
The Chicago school opposes monopolies and bailouts, but they support the conditions that inevitably lead to monopolies and too-big-to-fail companies.
The conditions get created by government distortion of a market. Chicago School discourages government intervention.
That lack of intervention is what created the conditions
Capitalism naturally moves towards monopoly. Government regulation prevents monopolies. Capitalism accumulates power. Capitalists use that power to influence the government into letting them accumulate more power, until they have enough power to remove the regulations that prevent monopolies, then the capitalists form monopolies, then we get the very situation that we’re describing.
Government regulation also creates and sustains monopolies. Most cable companies have competition prohibited by law. Bail outs allow companies that should fail and be replaced by many smaller companies to instead be more monopolistic.
And how do you think laws like these came into existence? Capitalists accumulated power and then used that power to influence the government to protect their business.
You’re so close but for some reason you refuse to accept that business can and does influence the government.
But beyond that, the regulations we’re talking about were anti-monoply regulations. Despite you saying that the Chicago school is anti-monoply, they pushed to defang regulations that combated monopolies. Your justification is that regulations create monopolies, but you provide no reasoning why defanging anti-monoply regulations would reduce monopolies.
Blaming capitalism because doing a bad thing led to bad results is like blaming a recipe for being bad when you swap the eggs for cottage cheese. When you let companies make rules, that’s government intervention.
“that’s not real capitalism” seems to be the new “that’s not real communism”.
Capitalism gave unscrupulous people the power to do bad things. It is ignorant to try to absolve capitalism of this.
Capitalism is a tool to concentrate wealth and power, it is absolutely shocked Pikachu when those people use that wealth and power to influence the government to do bad things.
You’re claiming both that the government is the problem for not stopping people from doing bad things, and also you’re saying that the Chicago school was right for pressuring the government to remove their ability to stop people from doing bad things.
No I’m only claiming that the government was acting outside it’s role of ensuring a free market. When they do this it leads to distortion and provides a pathway to monopolies. Government has a role to ensure markets stay free by doing things like punishing fraud and enforcing contract law.
What they shouldn’t be doing is providing incentives for specific behaviors, or creating regulatory hurdles that prevent new companies from competing in a market. They also shouldn’t be bailing out companies that are too big to fail or giving them beneficial bankruptcy terms.
It’s not the cars fault for breaking down if you don’t change the oil and add sugar to the gas.