Rent seeking is all Capitalism is about.
They call it a moat.
They call it a moat.
It’s so transparently and frequently stated outright, that building companies geared around achieving that has become the norm: it is the fundamental business-model of _every_ _single_ unicorn startup, or the company that buys them. Launch, squeeze out competitors by relying on VC money, capture the market, and become the sole dominant force in that market and use your position to then pull up the ladder behind you and cement your position. Uber and Facebook are prime examples of this.
> capture the market, and become the sole dominant force in that market and use your position to then pull up the ladder behind you and cement your position
This is worth discussing in detail. Becoming dominant by providing a better thing, or investing more capital, is not tilting the playing field, it's winning the game. Getting government protected monopolies, special tax write-offs, subsidies, exclusive grants is. Uber and Facebook are not anticompetitive just because they are dominant, they are anticompetitive to the extent that they specifically use their dominance to influence politics.
Both perfectly competitive markets and monopolistic markets are part of the broad term capitalism.
Capital consolidates over time and seeks to influence policy-makers to create anti-competitive regulations.
Every single time.
And no doubt there are a bunch of other definitions that aren't so popular, so the parent commenter could even be using one of those. It might even be his own pet definition that he just made up on the spot right now. The author always gets to choose what a word means, so if something seems off "It isn't" isn't a logical retort. You first need to clarify what the author intended the word to mean.
This is an absolutely insane take if you want to be taken seriously in a conversation. Making up definitions on the spot and "getting to choose what a word means" is deliberately acting in bad faith.
Rule #1 of logical debate is to agree on definitions, otherwise you're just yelling past each other.
Not quite. Not taking the time to understand what someone means when they use a word is acting in bad faith. Using a word as you understand it, even if that does not match how others understand it, before the word is contextually defined cannot be in bad faith. Nobody can read minds. It is impossible for one to predict how the reader thinks the word is defined. You can only work with what you know. Fundamentally, the onus must be on the reader to ensure that they have full knowledge of the author's intent.
> Rule #1 of logical debate is to agree on definitions
Agreed. The bad faith actor with the username antisthenes that I replied to earlier failed to do that, putting in absolutely no effort to find the necessary common ground. He assumed the definition and then came up with a ridiculous comment built up around that false assumption. Hence why I called him out on his bullshit.
Besides, what's the other option, rent seeking is socialism? A barter system?
Rent seeking is an Econ 101 example of market inefficiency.
> what's the other option, rent seeking is socialism?
Rent seeking is rent seeking. It is a form of corruption, via regulatory capture. It is a way in which any political system can fail, not limited to an ideology like "socialism" or "capitalism".
That's a human problem.