In my opinion Capitalism is not the perfect system, it's better than the alternatives.
That, however, doesn't mean we should not criticize and try to amend any wrongdoings that Capitalism has evolved to have.
This is really not generally true. I would gladly take socialism in the Czechoslovakia over capitalism in some third world country (say Pinochet's Chile). Capitalism worked very well in the West after the WWII, but that system had strong elements of socialism, too. But it's important to realize that for many third world countries, capitalism was not a success.
On the other hand, what was generally successful was democratic governance (maybe with exception of India and China). This is often conflated with (real world) capitalism (and dictatorship with socialism). But they really are pretty much orthogonal ideological axes.
>>On the other hand, what was generally successful was democratic governance (maybe with exception of India and China).
As an Indian, Let me tell you. It is actually quite successful in India. Issues in India have more to do social-cultural set up of the society than anything else. You don't change these sort of things with change in governance and economic systems.
Free market/Communism/Socialism aren't panacea. One needs to stop looking them as hammers and all problems as nails.
If natural monopolies are left unchecked to grow in power, how can you be sure that they won't become powerful enough to use force to protect their or their cartels' interests?
A better question would be "how can I be sure that capitalists and government won't cooperate for establishing monopolies"? For that, I don't have an adequate answer. At least, in capitalism, there are competitors lobbying against it, creating some virtual political market. Full government monopoly is generally much worse.
A natural monopoly could, without any government interference or help, exert a lot of the same coercive tactics a government-supported monopoly can. With a large enough size, a natural monopoly could make the barriers of entry for any potential competitor so insurmountable that it would have the same effect as making competition illegal.
The only thing that can break monopolies naturally is technologicall progress, because only new technologies can make older monopolies obsolete. But then again, relying on a constant stream of innovation to keep our economy from collapsing seems like a losing battle. And also, lately technology is all about making rich people richer and poor people poorer. So much for hope.
Bing only survives because Microsoft has deep pockets, a result of their monopolies and huge war chest of course. It now powers Yahoo's Search (since their own search engine is long dead) and DuckDuckGo. You see, DDG is nothing more than a glorified UI over Bing's infrastructure.
And no, competing with Google Search isn't possible, unless you're Microsoft and like to play pretend.
Remember 1999-2001 when Google unseated Yahoo from the king of search? It was a feat that seemed impossible when you had established search engines like Lycos, Ask Jeeves, Excite, DogPile, etc. all competing in the space.
As with most industries and its enterprises, you'll always have an event horizon and then singularity until markets are saturated and the industry becomes irrelevant to the consumer.
But here's the problem: in 2000 there was no dominant design for search engines, so the market was still open for competition. The biggest problem is that right now Google Search is the dominant design. Google won because they changed how a search engine looked, felt and functioned. Nowadays though, people want and expect Google for searches. It's a verb you know. Then webmasters in turn are optimizing their websites for Google's crawler, which in turn ensures that Google always has an edge. And you can't beat them at their own game, because they have the mindshare and the resources to keep ahead.
> ...until markets are saturated and the industry becomes irrelevant to the consumer
I don't think search will ever be irrelevant, but that was my other point. Technological innovation is the only natural force that breaks monopolies, but relying on constant technological innovation means our economy, our way of life, isn't sustainable.
Citation needed, as they claim they pull in from a number of sources, one of them including Bing. "A glorified UI over Bing" seems like a bit of a stretch, but if that's actually true, it would be good to know.
The screwed up train system in the UK is a natural monopoly under lax regulation. It means we face high fares, bad service and low investment.
This is possible because railroads are hierarchical, and all other means of travel are point-to-point. Networks always win against hierarchies.
While this essay is not without merit, I doubt that Lenin can be counted as the expert on what capitalism is.
"Lenin had that idea and Lenin was a bad guy" isn't a real argument on why you disagree with the idea. Please explain why, I'm actually interested in understanding your point of view.
So, Lenin was right in that capitalism can easily evolve into government cronyism if left unchecked. But then it isn't capitalism anymore.
This is precisely what British East India Company did in India.
>>So, Lenin was right in that capitalism can easily evolve into government cronyism if left unchecked. But then it isn't capitalism anymore.
Capitalism or Communism, the issue is accumulation of a lot of power in a few hands. Once that happens, things are basically done for the benefit of a few banks/dictators/rulers and then things start going downhill from there.
It doesn't help that much of the written record on which belief in the existence of coercive monopolies was based came from the Hearst newspapers - which were a sort of monopoly ( or at least a rather large amalgamation ).
A corporation is just the convenient legal form to aggregate earnings and liabilities from cooperative action.
Isn't more the definition of classical liberalism rather than capitalism as an economical system ? Because you could argue that China's economy is capitalist yet there is virtually no difference between the state and most of the Chinese industry.
Is capitalism simply the state of affairs of contemporary Western society?
In that case, capitalism includes things like labor unions, state regulations, corruption, etc. So the word refers to a very dynamic and tumultuous process involving constant struggle between opposing forces.
That's never going to be a "perfect system" of course. What we think of as opposition to capitalism is then a big part of how the system regulates itself.
But maybe capitalism is more correctly thought of as a certain set of forces and structures operating in the larger state of affairs.
For example, capitalism is whatever is advocated for by those who own and manage concentrated capital. Then, too, opposing this should be natural for anyone who doesn't belong to that class and doesn't expect to.
I'm just saying that the concept "capitalism" deserves analysis if we want to talk about whether it's good or bad and to what degree "we" should oppose it or try to change it.
So it seems.
Also remember nearly much of the economic progress in the west is the direct result plundering the wealth of other countries by colonizing them.
If they had to play by the same rules as everyone else. Things would be way different.
What is the best sorting algorithm? Is it the one that sorts a random list in the shortest time? Or the one that uses the least memory? Most likely we'll pick by balancing a few important metrics, which leaves us with "optimal". Far from perfect.
If we're discussing Capitalism vs Socialism, instead of criticizing the opposition for ignorance (like every comment below the WashPo story), let's accept that different groups are optimizing for different goals. And there are so many competing objectives: efficient distribution of wealth, national economic growth, safety net for unlucky/disadvantaged, protecting shared resources (environment), etc etc etc.