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Comment by herghost | Hacker News Reader

For Capitalism to work properly the government needs to be be empowered, and properly able, to enforce rules that prevent any one organisation from becoming so powerful that it corrupts and undermines the whole system. We don't have that today.

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Its important to prevent individual companies from doing it but its also important to prevent groups of companies and even entire industries from doing it.

It really is this simple. Unfortunately simple isn't the same thing as easy.

That is one of the key ideas of social democracy, the belief that different economic powers in society must be balanced. Society is viewed as being made up of different interest groups who’s interests must be balanced in a fair and civilized manner.

The Government is empowered. We know that because they have broken up companies in the past for that reason. The issue is Congress is not willing to do it (you can ponder the why for yourself). A solution may be to throw out the politicians before destroying our whole system.

Ah - so Distinguishing between possession of power and actual willingness to use that power.

Meaning that it’s not a design issue it’s a political issue.

Indeed.

I agree with this if you add "properly incentivized" to that list of conditions. As of now, in the U.S., it seems like the power exists, but not the motivation, and that's at least as big a problem as the other way around.

>powerful that it corrupts and undermines the whole system. We don't have that today.

This is a little dramatic. There are no companies that qualify for the size of "undermining the whole system".

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