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.
Save for pay for delay, all of those rely on patents and copy-rights, which are government intervention.
According to the first source, it also looks like competitors are entering and offering lower prices, including open source methods (though I have no idea how that really works). One of the biggest problems for all of them is the government saying "no, you can't do this or that for whatever reason". Sometimes it's good for the government to intercede, but it seems like in this case it's helping perpetuate monopolies.
Insulin prices would be a lot lower if more people were allowed to produce and sell it.
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.
I wasn't aware there are ao many other options? Could you reference some?
I guess you could grow and make everything yourself, buy that doesn't seem like an economic system.
I'm actually not sure how pay was distributed in feudalism, so that could theoretically be another way, but I doubt it is.
Something like UBI would be the latter option.
Maybe if you had capitalism at a macro level, but communism at a micro level. Each town internally worked like communism, but interacted with others in a capitalist fashion. But even there, there will be people in the town distributing pay (or goods and services directly) without you having control over it. You might be able to be especially charismatic, or threaten a revolt, but I don't think those are things people can typically do.
I've actually been thinking that AI poses a substantial enough existential risk that it probably should be called Abominable Intelligence.
Something so small would have to spin so fast that the sun would look like a strobe light. You'd have to orient it so that the inside never sees the sun, but it'll always be night.
That said, I love the idea of building halos, and can't wait for them to be commonplace.
I think everything I said applies to stupid people as well.
There'll always be people who need to rely on charity, but if even a guy in a wheelchair can make a good living and has more opportunities than he can count I'd say that's a really good sign.