> In capitalism everybody specializes in something, retailers in trading, logistics in storage and transport and producers in producing. The most efficient way to improve all that is to have vertically integrated business where you do all of the above.
I don't agree with this, merging completely unrelated activities into one company isn't good or efficient - it's only a good idea because the perverse incentives disappear, which exist, because the big powerful fish (the retailers who monopolize access to markets) can dictate the terms for small and divided fish (the producers who produce the goods).
This is endemic in the system, and very hard to fight against.
It's also incredibly prevalent in the field of software engineering as well - if I create a best-in-class open-source tool, I won't see a dime of return on it (maybe very little), even if a huge cloud provider build a product on top of it that makes billions (this has happened too many times to count).
If I do the same thing in the confines of a big company, the end result wouldn't look like capitalism at all - lets say I do the same good work, but someone has an even better idea or executes better on it - in a free-market system if somebody were to come up with a better tool, they would just announce it, and people would be free to move to it - in a corporate setting, it would be seen as redundant, a waste of money, and an organizational red flag to run 2 separate parallel teams.
It'd be great if there existed a system that rewarded individuals and organizations according the value they bring to the table. However at the very mention of 'intrinsic value', capitalists break out in hives and call you a Marxist.
