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Comment by whitemary | Hacker News Reader

Capital accumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall are the objective fundamental causes of inequality in every capitalist society, which is why every capitalist society depends on a plethora of ostensible efforts to counter these fundamental characteristics of capitalism.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_accumulation

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to...

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If the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was the underlying problem, basic needs and housing would be dirt cheap. That's not a problem - it's a good thing for consumers (and therefore the lower classes). It's the plethora of efforts to counter this which capitalists employ (mainly monopolization) to inflate prices anyway despite underlying increased efficiency (and less labor) that's the problem. The main problem though is that labor is perpetually kept desperate enough to accept bargains which favor investors, and consumers have no other means of gaining capital, even as they get automated out of the job market.

It's a fundamentally unfair system which inevitably maximizes inequality. It's untenable without a government-enforced wealth-redistributing tax to offset that.

> It's untenable without a government-enforced wealth-redistributing tax to offset that.

I find it interesting that you point the problem (this is not capitalism but rather the lack of it) and then suggest that the government (which made this whole system possible) somehow fixes this. The government is the problem and a top down approach doesn't work (it didn't work for the soviets and it's not going to work now).

The solution is capitalism, and liberalization of the markets. In other words, letting people and capital build houses and live in them.

You post is not coherent with the one you are replying to. Without government setting the rules, capitalism leads to monopolies, like it did with standard oil.

The bigger company can kill all competition despite having inferior product with unfair practices such as - Dumping, market manipulation, self-dealing, wash trading, antitrust, insider trading, collusion, cartels, negative externalities, anticompetitive practices, misinformation, corporate espionage, etc.

If you take off the last remaining government safeguards, you will not have more competition. You will have monopolies for good we need to survive.

We will arrive at neo-feudalism.

Capital accumulation is necessary because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In other words, you can't merely "create value" as a capitalist. Capitalists must accumulate capital merely to avoid losing everything. Capital accumulation is protected because capitalists literally created a government for that express purpose.

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