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0 pointsgenewitch1y ago0 comments

I'm actually shocked no one is arguing with you about your first two sentences. Capitalism will always have one lucky or unscrupulous company after another swallowing the smaller players.

you have 5 equal companies producing widgets. One of the companies has their building near a freeway, and one day a fully loaded truck crashes through a railing and impacts their building, causing a fire and lots of damage. Sure, they have insurance or whatever, but that company's customers don't care about that, they needed those widgets this week. Luckily one of the other four companies has them in stock and they can fill their order elsewhere. That company they filled the order with now has more capital, perhaps they hire a new employee or buy additional tools or machines. Now they can out-compete the other four, for whatever reason, QC, price, etc. The former company might be unable to keep up with the 3+1 other companies on the same playing field, so may sell to one of the other four, but only the latter company in the above example may have the money available to buy.

This is all simplified and nitpicking what i am saying is futile, because the point is - it doesn't matter how many companies are competing, nothing is in equilibrium, and this doesn't even get in to active sabotage or espionage. A lucky company will buy an unlucky company. Eventually you'll end up with 3 or fewer companies when there used to be dozens or even hundreds.

The end goal of a company is to be like Samsung, General Electric, Sony, etc - make everything, sell everything, own everything. A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!

I don't have a solution, because there is a compelling argument to be made for huge companies being able to provide superior quality, price, whatever because of scales of economy, and it just takes one bright lawyer at a multinational to say "but if you break us up it will accelerate climate change because of x, y, z issues we have solved by fact of owning everything!"

Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this, but that would require global cooperation. I think the upside that things would gradually become more affordable would be a good selling point - if all companies are operating with the understanding the shareholders, owners, etc have a hard ceiling on how much value they can extract from the endeavor...

0 comments

AnthonyMouse1y ago

> The former company might be unable to keep up with the 3+1 other companies on the same playing field, so may sell to one of the other four, but only the latter company in the above example may have the money available to buy.

Your assumption is that companies can be destroyed but not created, which isn't true. The way prevent monopolies, then, is to make it as easy as possible to create new companies. There is no monopoly if five new companies are created for every two the incumbent buys or destroys.

> Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this

This has really nothing to do with it. Google is a public company. It could easily be just as big without any single individual owning more than $10M in shares.

genewitchOP1y ago

i mentioned that:

> A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!

and i disagree that a company can get as big as google if everyone involved was wealthcapped at $10mm. There'd be no real reason to seek ever-higher profits, especially if every company was forced to abide these rules.

as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits? I don't actually think it's weird. It is telling. I bet it's supply and demand, though.

AnthonyMouse1y ago

> and i disagree that a company can get as big as google if everyone involved was wealthcapped at $10mm. There'd be no real reason to seek ever-higher profits, especially if every company was forced to abide these rules.

As it is many of these companies are predominantly owned by index funds and pension funds, i.e. the retirement savings of ordinary people, with a net worth of e.g. $200,000 rather than $10,000,000. But they'd rather it be $250,000, wouldn't they? So the incentive remains.

> as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits?

That's not weird, it's how supply and demand works. When demand is higher than supply, anyone who can provide supply makes a lot of money. That's the incentive for anyone who can to increase the amount of supply they can provide, until the price comes back down and increasing supply is no longer profitable.

But OPEC is a cartel, and cartels artificially constrain supply. This is why monopolies are bad.

pompino1y ago

I don't think social or economic ideologies can exist in isolation. I think its a constant push/pull between different versions, interpretations and combinations of them, interacting, evolving, changing all the time. Some of it driven by the state apparatus, some by emergent group behavior and/or public sentiment via the participants in the local and global economy. It could just be my uneducated brain but I've always had a nagging feeling that all of this (macro-level economics and polices/programs) is a lot of hot-air and people just hand-waving exceptions away to push their own agenda.

DEADMINCE1y ago

The solution is pretty easy - put caps on various types of growth/income/profit for corporations.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsgenewitch1y ago0 comments

I'm actually shocked no one is arguing with you about your first two sentences. Capitalism will always have one lucky or unscrupulous company after another swallowing the smaller players.

0 comments

AnthonyMouse1y ago

> Limiting personal wealth to 10-100 million dollars, even "on paper", might prevent this

This has really nothing to do with it. Google is a public company. It could easily be just as big without any single individual owning more than $10M in shares.

genewitchOP1y ago

i mentioned that:

> A company being lucky for a few quarters even gets to spend money lobbying for preferential regulations that prevent further competitors from entering the market!

AnthonyMouse1y ago

> as an aside, isn't it weird that during the high fuel prices in the last 4 years the fuel producing companies have made record profits?

But OPEC is a cartel, and cartels artificially constrain supply. This is why monopolies are bad.

pompino1y ago

DEADMINCE1y ago

The solution is pretty easy - put caps on various types of growth/income/profit for corporations.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse