Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.
Why not just step forward into the Acceptance-Stage of Ideology-Death, instead of being caught with the intellectual trousers down half a century later by ones googling grandkids on a witch hunt?
Feudalism is a system of rule by networks of oaths and obligations, with military service as the top links. Its practicioners also historically depised merchants and traders from the top and bottom of the hierarchy. It aims for lifetime oaths.
And it is capitalism which cannot accept its ideological death, not communism? The one who proclaimed its inevitability loudly only to die in a single human lifetime, and is preoccupied with 19th century writings and works from unquestioned imperatives rather than experimentation? I think there is some major projection going on here.
Marx called this sort of thing "the internal contradictions of capitalism"; he argued that capitalism was an inherently unstable structure, just as many writers have argued that democracy was inherently unstable. They might be right. But in either case, the possible fact that one system inevitably gives rise to its opposite doesn't make it the same as its opposite.
I mean, just look at the jungle of regulations and the vast inefficient bureaucracy of the US healthcare system. Those 15k layers of shite can only happen with just as many corps doing everything to either save their profits or trying to get as large a piece of the cake as possible. Public good be damned.
Say if the US gov planned to add $100 per patient in some grant for whatever reason. How much do you think would actually trickle down to the patient? I'd be like nervously donating $100 to a dodgy charity in a corrupt developing nation in the 1960s.
I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.
Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage.
> I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.
You're missing the point entirely. The comparison if ofc with what would happen if e.g. a Nordic government would do the same thing under a system of universal healthcare.
Sectors that lack competitive markets include the military, healthcare in much of the world, banking, and most of telecommunications.
I agree that business (not just capitalism!) creates incentives to destroy free markets, just as politics creates incentives to destroy democracy. When actors succeed in following those incentives, that ends capitalism by eliminating competitive markets, which prevents the price system from being used to allocate resources. Competitive markets and the price system are central characteristics of capitalism; where they fail to exist, what you have is not capitalism, but something else.
At this point I'm starting to repeat myself, because I've already explained this about as clearly as I know how, and you still apparently don't understand.
The two examples are temporal inverses of one another. In the situation of capitalism collapsing into government-granted monopolies, free-market capitalism is the first stage, and state central planning is the second stage. In the situation in China, the first stage was a vanguard-party-led society governed by a dictatorship of the proletariat that carries out state central planning, and the second stage is mostly free-market capitalism.
I don't think that anyone ever tried to use "Leninist system" to mean "a system where the government is not corrupt", but maybe I just haven't read enough of Lenin?
The only thing this had to do with is what incentive structure each set up and what the expected outcomes of those are.
Leninism:
Concentrate the power into professional revolutionaries, a vanguard, to lead the people into making the "correct" choices.
Incentive: Keep this new and unprecedented amount of power indefinitely.
Outcome: Corruption of whatever ideals they might have had.
Capitalism:
Concentrate the wealth and thus power into businessmen/corporations with the purpose of keep accumulating wealth indefinitely.
Incentive: Use the power and influence of wealth to do just that, accumulate more wealth.
Outcome: Manipulation of rules, regulations, and the market.
This is what they are. This is what we've seen for more than a 100 years for both. This is what they are accountable for.
You seem to be relying on a rather narrow definition of "capitalism".
But the standard definition I'm using has evolved a bit and is somewhat richer. Quoting the Wikipedia definition:
> Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, private property, property rights recognition, voluntary exchange, and wage labor. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investments are determined by owners of wealth, property, ability to maneuver capital or production ability in capital and financial markets—whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.
I think that is a very good and uncontroversial definition of "capitalism", and that is the one I am using. It sounds like you have some non-mainstream definition in mind?
I agree that the outcomes of democracy can be bad. But I don't believe that bad and undemocratic are synonymous.
capitalism is a way of organizing production with workers being paid a flat rate and owners keeping all additional value added by the workers in exchange. is that not how pharmaceutical companies are arranged?