Its sort of like claiming corporations love the idea of abolishing contract law, forgetting that no matter how much they'd make in revenue, it would never make up for their expense side going crazy.
Another interesting comparison is in an extremely simplistic manner a company would appear to greatly benefit from dumping all their toxic waste out an open window where it blows 10 miles downwind at some city; however the only thing that could be worse than living in that downwind city is working in the same building next to that toxic open window... I was cool with my local nuclear power plant when it was owned an managed by a corporation 10 miles downwind, not melting down would be very enlightened self interest, but not so cool about the plant when it got sold to someone 1000 miles upwind.
Typically at least effects of scale and cartel-like contracts with other major players.
A simple, if specious answer: The Golden rule - she who has the gold, makes the rules.
Are they superior products? Meh.
Would you particularly miss them if they were destroyed? Unlikely. Somebody just as good would come along by and by, or one of the other ones would rise to replace them.
Are you gonna pay for them anyways? Bet your ass you will.
Those people aren't capitalists in the proper definition of the term. Capitalism is voluntarism, which manifests as free markets in practice.
I don't think my ISP choice is a result of free market capitalism. It seems an awful lot like collusion against the free market, against competition, locking me down to one ISP depending in which region I happen to live.
The US definitely does not have a free market. I would venture a guess that most of the regulations are actually designed to benefit a select few at the top of some company or investment system.
Which makes sense, since that's exactly what the label "capitalism" was created for.
Lots of people have, however, bought into propaganda that capitalism is something else that was created by capitalists after the criticism in which the system was named.
Blood lines (either real, or "Roman-style" (meaning voluntary adoption)), outright whim or military power (either individual, or organized), or otherwise advancement within a rigid hierarchy.
None of those seem to me even remotely preferable over a system where making money means advancement.
Unless communism/socialism is not what you mean with "continuing to build".
And consequently, in practice, there are no capitalists and no free markets, by the proper definition of the term.
(As in holders of capital and people following the competitive philosophy.)
If you're a car careening down a road. You're going to fast, and an accident is about to happen, but you can, say, either hit a group of male toddlers or a slightly smaller group of female toddlers. How do you choose ?
Your answer is simply "No", and that's just not acceptable. Does that mean anarchism ? You must choose, because the real world needs to exist and the economy must keep working. Without it, we wouldn't be fed, wouldn't be able to move any significant distance, wouldn't be anything.
The problem with the "no" answer is that a this refusal to choose, in the economy, would match in the dilemma with first hitting all the boys, driving back and forth a few times to make sure you've got them all, and then get going on the girls. That's what shutting down the economy would do. One might assume this is not in fact what you intend, so what are you going to do ? What is the superior alternative to capitalism ?
There are two definitions of "capitalist":
(1) A holder of capital,
(2) An adherent to "capitalism", the dominant economic system of the industrialized West in the mid-late 19th Century (which has been diluted by subsequent reforms, but remains a core element of the structure of economy in most of the modern developed world), named "capitalism" by its 19th Century socialist critics for the ways in which it systematically served the interests of capitalists (by the preceding definition.)
The GP post seems to be accurate whether using "capitalist" in sense (1) or sense (2).
"Crony capitalism" is the only kind that has ever existed, and definitely the kind for which the term "capitalism" was coined. The idea of any other kind of "capitalism" is, well, highly implausible. To avoid cronyism, you are going to have to take out the core features that make it capitalism.
> I'd bet that I'd consider some of the "subsequent reforms" you've described as fundamental corruptions of the system.
Thing like establishing labor rights are certainly "corruptions" if you view the 19th Century system initially labelled "capitalism" as pure.
I don't see "corrupting" the purity of capitalism as a problem, though.
> For example, political donations as corporate free speech (Citizens United v FEC) doesn't make much sense in a world where shareholders aren't engaged and active participants in company behavior.
Citizens United is a move back in the direction of a pure 19th Century capitalism, and a reversal of reform efforts aimed at constraining the dominion of the capital-holding class (which is what campaign finance reform efforts that seek to limit the influence of wealth on politics to protect democracy from capitalism are.)
Whether shareholders are personally active or find it most useful to give management free reign is immaterial to this.
> In other words, corporate governance is broken, something that Reich gets right.
What Reich gets wrong is embracing the idea that capitalism is betrayed by the various failures, rather than the source of them. His idea of supporting a "share the gains" capitalism is amusing: "share the gains" is not, and has never been, capitalism (though it's occasionally a lie that capitalists use to justify capitalism, as in "trickle-down" economics.)
There are a lot of other, less savory, ways to manipulate free markets to stifle competition, however. Your friendly neighborhood cable company, for one example.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/peter-thiels-tech-book-became...
Which is a summary of:
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/donald-trumps-shadow-p...
> Did Apple look for unfair advantages or did they design products that people loved and bought in preference to others?
They made cool products, but they're the most valuable company in the world, at least in part, thanks to the unfair advantages too. The most blatant of them being the $14.5 billion in unpaid taxes in Ireland. And this is Ireland! Imagine if they paid the taxes proportionally in each of the countries where their operate, or in the US at least.
> Traders (capitalists) should indeed look for monopolies if they don't want a race to the bottom but that monopoly can be based on unique value to the customer if crony capitalism isn't involved although sadly it's all too prevalent.
Never have I heard of an industry that benefited from having a monopoly by a for-profit company more than not. Precisely because they are for-profit. These companies work to increase revenue; as much as they market otherwise, the "value to the customer" is but a means to grow this revenue. If they can grow this revenue without providing as much "value to the customer", or in fact, if they can increase revenue by providing less "value to the customer", they will.
And this is not me vilifying them, it's sadly the way things work. Otherwise, we'd have super cool stuff but companies would go out of business. Take every example of a monopoly though, and since they don't need to provide as much value, they all end up decreasing it.
> Markets are dynamic. Conditions change. People's needs and desires change. The monopoly of today will eventually dissolve and at best become one of many equivalent options, tomorrow.
Except when they don't. I think you're thinking of this only from the tech lens, right after a period of rapid growth and lots of marketing, and he staple child for this claim is probably Microsoft, and how Apple went from the underdog to the beamoth. I have two comments on this;
1. What really broke Microsoft's monopoly? I don't think it was new companies innovating, or people's demands changing. It was a change in the system and ideology. Tech went from being your standard capitalist industry to an interesting beast thanks to the emergence of the Free Software Movement, which shares many ideologies with socialism/marxism.
2. Would Standard Oil or the Bell Telephone Company have "eventually dissolved"? The problem with this system is that it's easier for the rich to get richer; if you have a monopoly and the conditions are changing, easier for you to buy out competition or R&D into the next thing than for any other company. Even now that Standard Oil and the Bell Telephone Company have been artificially split the companies that came out of them are still the biggest ones around; not some new ones, though the times have changed a lot.
> That's one of the messages of zero to one, Peter Thiel's recent book.
Haven't read the book, but Peter Thiel is a businessman after all. I'd take his views more as opinions, since he's not really a full-time economist researcher.
That's not to say I'm anti-capitalist by any means. I think it's a great economic engine and a tool for great good. That we can never turn our backs on, lest it devour us. ;)
You don't have to do it first if everybody before you couldn't close the deal.