Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

Capitalism is indeed complex, and something I think gets missed in the popular perception is that capitalism depends completely on things like property rights and contract law. Basically, regulation and government is strictly required and the details of that regulation are always up for debate.

That said, people who talk about 'evening the playing field' scare me. For starters, armchair analysts underestimate the amount of good done by greedy people in a well created market economy. For seconds, fairness is very expensive. And for thirds, people don't understand what the regulation of the current systems does. There is no need to pronounce capitalism doomed when it has such a track record of success.

>> Regulated capitalism is an answer to this fundamental imbalance.

This assumes that governments are incorruptible. Monopolies don't exist without government collusion. In the game of Monopoly, that part is played by the roll of the dice - which favors certain players.

So ironically, more regulation would potentially lead to creation of bigger monopolies as it gives the capitalist's more incentive to influence the regulations and create monopolies for themselves. That is what we see happening in the real world.

> In the end, it leads to impregnable monopolies if unchecked.

That's the conventional wisdom, but there are no examples of it happening, and examples of the reverse. Rockefeller's market share diminished throughout the years of SO's anti-trust trial.

See "Titan" by Chernow.

Free markets rely on a system of laws and regulation that prevent the use of force or fraud, and provide enforcement of contracts. That function is provided by government.

The notion that the internet required government technologies and so otherwise there would be no internet is not correct. Google FidoNet, for just one example (there are others).

Of course a painting can be value creation. Aesthetic value is as real as food value or any other desirable in the eyes of ourselves or others. Ultimately, value comes from our local star which blasts us with a massive amount of energy every day. The rest is redistribution if you like. In other words it provides the conditions whereby we get up in the morning and expend energy doing something someone finds of value. Along the chain, someone worked harder and innovatively such that someone else could satisfy the desire to own that painting whether for the value they themselves could see in it or for the value others will see in it in the future (investment).

It is a good example. The creation of value, such as a painting, increases the total value of goods and services in the economy. It most certainly is creation.

The value generated flows back into the economy as whomever generated it can't spend it anywhere else. No one plays the zero-sum game.

You'd generally consider the bank to be a player in the game theory sense, making it zero sum.

It injected money into the game, but not value. No new properties were created, for example.

To be pedantic: minus taxes

Energy might be conserved, but wealth is not. Life is not a zero sum game.

Society is vastly more wealthy than we've ever been before. Access to education, medicine, information, transportation, entertainment are at all time highs. Life expectancies continue to rise and gdp adjusted by purchasing power on a per capita basis is up over 40% in the last 3 decades.

> The world is finite. Resources are finite, and infinite expansion is impossible.

If you were right, the $10 trillion China added to its economy annually (you know, just ~$64 trillion of new GDP that didn't exist before, over the next five years) - in just the span of ~16 years, would have had to come out of someone else's pocket, which would have caused extreme collapse in numerous other major economies to make room for it. That of course didn't happen at all, the rest of the globe's GDP expanded along with China in real terms.

For all realistic practical purposes - since we're nowhere near maximum resource utilization - that has yet to be an actual problem and we're up to 7.x billion people now. Every serious problem to that expansion, we've managed to solve, enabling continued expansion (see: we were all supposed to starve to death decades ago).

Back in reality - and out of the realm of theory that only exists in a strict vacuum - Capitalism is the exact opposite of a zero sum game. That has been proven by the radical improvement in living standards at the median for all the developed nations, all of which heavily utilize the free market economic system (including all of the Scandinavian nations, none of which are actually Socialist at all).

If Capitalism were a zero sum game, China would not have just enjoyed the greatest, fastest mass standard of living improvement in world history thanks to its modest adoption of the free market, and its blatant shift away from Statism.

The free market largely won globally, and thanks to that, the world has less poverty, war, violence and starvation than at any other time in history.

> infinite expansion is impossible.

Software is a fine counterexample. It's made of bits, which cost nothing to create, and the value is in the order of the bits, not the bits themselves.

you are twisting his words. there are sound arguments against capitalism and wealth creation but "resources are spent when you do things with them" isn't on the list.