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The primary ways people in capitalism get successful is by developing new technology or products, providing valuable services and employing people. The heroes of capitalism most celebrated here are people like Steve Jobs, Bill gates and Elon Musk. All of them have built fantastically successful companies, developing innovative and valuable new products and payed the wages of thousands or tens of thousands of people directly, and built ecosystems employing millions. All of those people benefited. Their customers benefited from useful products. Their suppliers benefited, their employees benefited otherwise why work for them? That is what capitalism is about.
But ok, you disagree, that's fine. I'm sure you must have good reasons. Please, tell me what non-capitalist system is better, how does it work and where has it been shown to be successful?
I'm genuinely interested in what you see as alternatives though. I'd love to turn this in a constructive direction. How do you see these weaknesses or failures of capitalism being addressed and what alternative system do you favour? How do you see innovations like those of Bill gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, Page and Brin, etc being created and being successful, building new businesses without Capitalism?
Have a look at Mondragon Cooperatives. It's a real life large scale implementation of Woker-owned Cooperatives. Not perfect but it does show a lot of the good possibilities.
Back in 2008 when the regular Capitalism crash happens where we plebs payed capitalists:
Mondragon: Spain's giant co-operative where times are hard but few go bust:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/07/mondragon-spai...
TL;DR of this article - Workers of Mondragon's Washing Machine factory got redundant due to recession lowering demand for their products. Instead of lay-offs, they compensated by lowering wages of managers (note that they have a rule where there is a max ratio of salary from lowest salary). Then offered these workers to retrain for free with commute allowance. Or offered early retirement with complete benefits and cash out their ownership.
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In general, the Theory of Value makes sense to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_value_(economics)
Capitalism doesn't just take a huge cut in what we deserve. But has also stripped us of our humanity.
The fact that MS have gotten a few slaps on the wrist, and that the EU rolled out GDPR to at least try to keep some semblance of privacy, is completely meaningless when you look at the massive profits MS gets from government contracts (through lobbying and favoritism), and the absolute havoc the latest EU copyright reform will cause for any internet-based business not big/rich enough to implement perfect automated upload filters. Funnily enough, Google and FB have the resources, so they're putting up a token protest, but in truth they know they will be benefitting from this legislation.
As for an alternative, you're arguing from a compromised starting point. You assume that we even need individual achievers like Bill Gates et. al., which is highly symptomatic of primarily American individualism and exceptionalism, and to a point also Ayn Randian objectivism. You see it everywhere, people put their heroes on pedestals, glorify them and attribute them great wisdom in all matters, due to their skills in one area.
It's the cult of celebrity, and there is a tendency to glorify the singular great achiever, while completely disregarding the foundations, all of the people who came before and laid the groundwork for progress. We are not standing on the shoulders of giants, we are standing on the shoulders of millions of ordinary people, who each did part of a greater collective whole. No man is an island, after all. No one came to where they are today purely through individual will and effort.
We don't need these massive businesses and we certainly don't need the people at the top, the rent-seekers who extract great wealth from the labor of others. Absolutely nothing created under the rule of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk et. al. created required their presence or even their existence. Innovation and progress doesn't happen on an individual level, it is a collective process.
So what I propose is to abolish to cult of imagined singular achievement, and realize that we can only achieve greatness by collective means, by working together. We may each be individuals with individualist streaks, but as a society we are a great collective of individuals.
What we need is to work together, to collectively own the values and value-creating constructs of our society. When people own a fair share, instead of a pittance, funnily enough their enthusiasm and loyalty goes way up.
You're still thinking from a capitalistic viewpoint, of individualism to the detriment of collective progress.
Objectives would be set collectively, decisions would be taken collectively, success would be collective and incentivized by the collectively progress that would be achieved.
If personal financial gain is your only motivator, you need to check your greed.
I'm not going to post long political discourses here. Read Peter Kropotkin's "The Conquest Of Bread" and Thomas Piketty's "Capital In The 21st Century". There's a lot more to read than just those, but they're a good start, to introduce you to how capitalism is wreaking havoc on the world.
If you go looking for people from wealthy backgrounds you'll find them, although you actually failed even at that, but they aren't the only kind. As another example Zuckerberg and Saverin founded TheFacebook.com with $2,000 scraped together while they were students. Google was also founded out of a garage.
Anyway, what's wrong with people with money using it productively to found successful companies, and employ people and provide valuable services? Surely that's a good thing? It seems to have worked well for China over the last 30 years, certainly compared to the previous 30.
Anyway, beyond software patents and copyright terms do you content that IP protections in general are a mistake? How do you see an alternative system working?