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Comment by Super_Jambo | Hacker News Reader

The title should be neoliberalism or free-market fundamentalists.

There's nothing inherent in the private ownership of capital that stops regulations which force markets to be competitive. And the article isn't even really arguing this, they're using capitalism as a shorthand for 'free markets'.

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I disagree. What's that one about how power corrupts? Power converges and consolidates into fewer and fewer hands if left be. Money begets power and that leads to lobbying which leads to regulatory capture and monopolistic abuses of power like exclusivity agreements. There may be some platonic idea where greed doesn't corrupt, but those examples seem to be few and far between.

> they're using capitalism as a shorthand for 'free markets'

Not at all; see my response to syliconadder. However, they are misusing the term. What they seem to mean by it is neither capitalism nor free markets but advertising/marketing.

Isn't it hard to divorce free-market from capitalism at this point of time?

Not at all. They're largely orthogonal to one another, one being about market access and the other about factors of production. In many ways they're even antagonistic; a system that asserts the primacy of capital over labor and treats it preferentially reduces access to markets for those whose primary contribution is labor (which is most of us). The two only seem hard to distinguish or disentangle because people are conditioned not to think too hard about the difference.

Academically maybe, but in practice?

Particularly be because, as Piketty shows, again and again and again, amassed concentrations of captial bend all politics to it, with seeming certain inevitability.

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