this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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The problem is that the biggest "winners" in this case are almost exclusively the people willing to go the furthest to put profits ahead of people, which in a better system would never be incentivized.
That leads to a beauty of capitalism though. People prioritize profit, yes, but with competition, the way to make a profit is to be appealing to people. You make a profit by providing the best good or service at the best price. This means that the people who have the goal of profits also have the goal of pleasing their customers.
There's a quote from somewhere that goes something like this "capitalism takes the most ambitious, selfish, and capable people and forces them to stay up at night thinking about what everyone else wants".
We have seem over and over again that companies will eventually become greedy and will kill all competition. One example Standard Oil , they will eventually not serve the customers as you mentioned. The customers will have to pay really high prices for lower quality service or product. I am not a lot into socialism because we come back to the same that one entity is controlling everything and we have seem also that the government sucks. So maybe a hybrid approach will be nice to try.
Monopolies are pretty dangerous, and I'd like to avoid then as much as possible.
I think that they're generally created and sustained by government intervention though. Bailouts, legal fees, red tape, price controls, exceedingly long copyrights, they all hurt new competitors more than established ones.
If one company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks then I'm going to buy someone else's bread and that company loses a lot of money.
If every company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks, that's an extraordinary opportunity for a new competitor to come in with reasonable prices.
One valid use of government power is punishing people who murder, and I'm not exactly sure what power cartels have outside of that.
I googled it and the Wikipedia page said they're inherently unstable, but I don't know how reliable that is.
In any case, I don't see how my second example isn't a cartel itself. All the bread companies are colluding to set the price of bread artificially high. The problem is there isn't much to stop new competitors (or to stop members defecting).
You should read Lenin's "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", you're like 2 steps from it, just in this moment you try to turn back the clock instead of looking forward.