It's literally just capitalism. This is the point of the economic system. Why are people surprised? Is the propaganda just that good?
People do it here, constantly. Look at the FTC - they're charged with maintaining and enforcing a competitive free market. But when they make rules or prevent monopolistic mergers or anti-competitive contracts, conservatives and libertarians lose their minds.
It seems nobody knows what capitalism is!
I could be wrong, but I think property use restrictions are actually more of a socialist concept. When done right, they're meant to protect others (aka society, in general - not some businesses that don't like having competitors across the street) from various harms, such as emissions, noise, overcrowding or things like that. In other words, not about what goes on at some property, but what happens to the outside because of it. But as the uncontrolled abuse grew unchecked, it became something else entirely.
This stuff, together with non-competes and exclusivity agreements is something different. I don't know what it is, but it's neither capitalism nor socialism "as they were well-meant", but rather a weird amalgamation of perverted concepts from both, leading to both erosion of healthy markets (so, harming capitalism) and degradation of life quality (so, harming socialism).
Yea, but that's not some strictly inherent property of capitalism, and I thought stakeholder vs shareholder is still an open issue?
Single family home zoning is the factor in bloated infrastructure and housing prices going up. This protects capital investment of a necessity which ensures exploitation of the working class.
I don't see how's that capitalism at all. If Coca-cola and Pepsi signed a agreement not to compete that was made public, the FTC would go after them. If Microsoft made secret backroom deals that gave them an unfair advantage, the FTC would and did go after them. If you don't like competition, having the government come in and say you're the only one that can do that just isn't how American is supposed to work.
Non-competes are anti-capitalism and anti-American. That they're used against bartenders and restaurant servers is just gross.
> where businesses grow too big (too close to monopolies) and go unchecked
By this reasoning, the Gilded Age was already "late stage capitalism", and yet somehow regulations were implemented and capitalism continued on, in a less shitty form.
We've done it before, we can do it again.
In a truly capitalistic economy, there would be no regulations preventing competitors from coming in and creating competition. The propaganda doesn't have to be good when nobody understands what is and isn't capitalism anyways.
It's the same as a farmer secretly buying up neighboring already irrigated fields from bankrupt farmers, and not planting on them in order to be able to raise the price on their own crops, assuming that the cost of importing the same crops from elsewhere is prohibitive and there is no other readily arable land nearby (thus they have a monopoly on the local market). So it's cheaper for them to leave the purchased fields fallow, and raise prices, than grow more crops.
This is the type of predatory capitalist practices for which we need regulation in the first place.
Which ones?