You know if you actually read a single history book you would be aware that ordo-liberalism has already been tried and that it didn't manage to counter-act the monopolizing nature of capitalism at large.
>>1899966Anonymous adding more companies to a market is not going to suddenly cause monopolies from existing, but remove pre-existing barriers that prevented people from entering in those markets. This lack of restriction at least give people options, and it indirectly prevents monopolies from having complete control over a market.
>>1899971This is a very interesting fairy tale however we just lived through 60 years of successive deregulation and *shock* the economy is more monopolized than ever because *suprise* deregulation also means the absense of anti-trust measures which means businesses are free, free to merge into monopolistic conglomerates to leverage their market power to exhort even more profit *shock*.
So you are wrong both on empirical and theoretical grounds. Sorry :(
>>1899983Tf you mean? Look around you? What’s the number of different brands of the same common items have you purchased compared to the previous decade. Then consider the number for most people currently entering the urban world today. Even more, consider the fact that people internationally are moving to cities of different sizes instead of mega cities these days as there are more options available to them than before. Sure the monopolies got larger, but so did the international market in response. Government regulations can help curb monopolies, but the real determinant of all competition in a market is simply the number of viable and active competitors.
Firstly you aren’t really describing corporatism in the “scientific” or theoretical sense, but that’s nitpicking.
A lot of it comes down to scale. You can’t have a bunch of small ma’ and pa’, say, nuclear reactors. You need big conglomerates to manage certain industries.
That said I’d argue it’s a myth that the “free market” will result in more competition, in fact I’d say the opposite has historically proven itself; I think the whole reason car dealerships exist is just because companies can’t sell consumers cars directly, or at least not easily, thanks to regulations. The classical liberal myth is one of an abstract “innovation” that doesn’t stand up to reality. They think that even in a case where the market is cornered by, say, standard oil, you can have some clever guy make some new “innovation” that would put Standard Oil out of business. The reality is that most monopolies would just buy out the competition or, failing that, run them out of town by selling at a loss.
There’s also the fact that honestly those big companies can provide a better deal to consumers than a bunch of small businesses. Walmart selling everything from guns to games to groceries not only saves consumers time, but also money: gun sales can be subsidized by vidya sales which can be subsidized by groceries. Lower prices all around. More competition would in fact represent a regression away from capitalist efficiency.
Under Socialism I think you’d see the rise of a massive, almost labyrinthine like hybrid of some WalMart and a mall; containing most everything people would need. A real agora of sorts.
>>1899994>Tf you mean? Look around you? What’s the number of different brands of the same common items have you purchased compared to the previous decade.Stopped reading there. Holy fuck, are you actually this economically illiterate? Are you unironically ignorant about the fact that a single brand doesn't represent a single business. Do you even know that Volkswagen/Audi/Bugatti/Lamborghini belong to the same company? That 90% of consumer glasses and shades on the market are produced by a single company, no matter the brand?Jesus.
>>1899996So what? Capitalism is bad because it leads to a centralization of capital and industry, but it’s good, because it leads to a centralization of capital and industry? If you want to do centralization, just be a socialist where that policy would make sense. As for the nuclear reactor idea, it’s already been shown in countries like China that it’s possible for a for-profit entity to manage government-level tasks if they’ve gathered the resources fairly through the extraction of capital from competition by providing better services anyways. Otherwise the country wouldn’t have so much (although very environmentally damaging) electricity available to even the poorest Chinese citizens.
>>1899994Lol, cities have never been so similar to each other than now. They have the same chain restaurants (owned by McDonaldsPespsiCo) the same local news station and newspaper (owned by TimeWarnerDisneyFoxMarvel) and the same banks (owned by BankOfAmericaWellsFargoLynch). What are YOU talking about? Have you actually moved once in your life. All
I am seeing monopolies and samesness, and the total lack of real choice.
>>1900010I do. I have to drive around constantly and move around throughout my province and see different companies everywhere all the time alongside major ones.
>>1900011>Driven around.So you actually have never lived somewhere else cool.
>see different companies everywhere all the time alongside major ones.No you didn't. Every single Western economy is now complete and utterly dominated by large conglomerates and monopolies. Virtually every single company is embedded in some kind of large supply network that either makes them outright and legally part of the monopoly or they have on paper some kind of legal independence but de facto they just operate like an outsourfes branch.
>provinceHere, just for you a Canadian conservative who explains to you how incredibly convergent culture has been among North American urban centers. He doesn't himself understand the material basis for this trend since he is a right-winger however it's still and interesting collection of evidence.
>>1900014Canada would be a lot more diverse in its markets (and also its exporters, seriously the oil reliance here is awful) if the landlords here could fuck off. Thankfully, the feds actually did something about our god awful pro-landlord zoning policies for their 100 million thing. If they keep going at their current pace, eventually everyone here can expect to at least have the same kind of chances Americans do at owning their own businesses in legitimate places.
>>1900018The over-whelming majority of new 'businesses' that spawned in the US over the last 20 years, as in a super-majority, aren't 'businesses' they are misclassified gig workers and fictious freelancers working for, guess what, monopolists, lmaoo. You aren't a fucking business if your de facto employer makes up some shitty legal vehicle to bail on taxes and social contributions. The US is just as much of a oligarchy as Canada.
>>1900020Well yeah no shit. People don’t just have small shops and gigs that become super popular and large overnight. Besides, that’s better than nothing right now, because our neighbours down there are struggling bad with mass layoffs and the reality of their austerity policies’ effects on public education. Many Americans are unhirable and the country in response is extracting a shitload of talent abroad to make up for it. Even if the businesses that do emerge from such an economy is shit, it’s better than nothing, and better than what my country has right now. Otherwise, our emigration numbers wouldn’t have remained so consistently high over the years.
>>1899962No, because competition isn't fair. Look at a country like Britain - it creates a lot of small, innovative companies, and you know what it does because it's a free market financial services economy? It immediately sells them to foreign firms who gut them for patents, leaving it with a miserable third-world tier joke economy everywhere outside London.
Or contrast the US: Yes, you can have a small farming enterprise - but of course, the seeds you use will be trademarked by a large farming enterprise. Your tractor will have DRM from a farm equipment monopoly. Your land will be owned in part by a banking monopoly. And so on and so on.
>>1900034Sharecropping as a service
>>1900005I would hesitate to talk about good or bad when discussing Capitalism, it just is. Let’s not forget Marx called it historically progressive. The chief problem lies in the nature of Capitalism, not the size of the firm. The profit motive.
Let me use a modern example. Thanks to their size, big video game publishers like EA can create some pretty huge AAA titles. Yet because their goal is to make more profit, year over year, you see all this talent and all these resources going towards the creation of derivative CoDs every year. And the worst trends in the industry: loot boxes, always online, season passes, are all a result of pursuing greater profits. Ubisoft doesn’t make the same fucking game reskinned a million times because the devs love AssCreed, they’re doing it because it’s good for profit.
Honestly I think big corps could make the transition to socialism easier if anything.
>>1900045>it just is>Let’s not forget Marx called it historically progressiveThat was not a moral judgment, only an observation. There is no reason to worship history as some thing we must move for the entertainment of future generations, and especially not as an excuse for career idealists such as yourself to avoid productive labor.
>>1899996>The classical liberal myth is one of an abstract “innovation” that doesn’t stand up to reality. They think that even in a case where the market is cornered by, say, standard oil, you can have some clever guy make some new “innovation” that would put Standard Oil out of business. The funny thing is that the science of innovation was already solved by the TRIZ methodology invented by soviet scientist Geinrich Altshuller. The entire capitalist world already uses it to some extent. Like you pointed out, the monopolists just buy up the competition, smother them, or even buy up patents and sit on them. Just like they burn surplus to raise prices or do planned obsolescence.
>>1900034Both your examples fail to account for the fact that those countries had and still have issues with even allowing people of different incomes and identities even get to own the land necessary to get to where they are today, and that progress is being made to open up those economies to more people internationally through the development of more ports, roadways, and railways. Again, it’s bad now, but it has and can be even worse.
>>1900065>and that progress is being made to open up those economies to more people internationally through the development of more ports, roadways, and railwaysIn the British case this certainly isn't true: trying to build a single high-speed railway has been a decades long saga which now culminates it being terminated like 1/3 of the way to where it was supposed to go. The only new ports we've got is a change in the regulatory status of existing ports (and a massive area around them that usually incorporates a nearby city no matter how far inland) to side-step worker protections and standards.
Our big historical issue with land ownership is that land
was held in common by ordinary people. Feudal lords came along and, with parliamentary approval, enclosed it for their own private use. In Scotland, you can add the highland clearances as late as the 1860s where people who had lived on land for generations, land which had often been effectively communal, were cleared off it to make room for sheep, which were more profitable. The American case - with homesteading and the like - is different, but Britain in particular makes nakedly clear that the current system was build on nothing short of legalized theft from the poor to give to the rich. (who often then ploughed their capital into industry, and who in large part still own the land and run the country to this day… though the industries and the jobs were dispensed with in the 1980s when they realised they could just invest abroad…)
>>1899962Class nature of the state. Why would porkies limit their wealth when they are hostile to each other (but more hostile still to proletariat)?
>>1899962Bro America is a dystopian shithole, clearly having a bunch of corporations doesn't lead to good outcomes
>can't we just fix a logical development of capitalism by reforming it???????????????????????
>mega corps have millions of subsidiaries and fake self employed people like uber and delivery services
>Wow so egalitarian and opportunity
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