Comment by ilrwbwrkhv

1 year ago

Yeah, it's time for Google to be broken up into pieces because of anti-competitive laws and really get back to making America into a capitalistic society once again.

7 comments

ilrwbwrkhv

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tdb7893  1 year ago

It's hard to get more capitalistic that the owners of capital trying to build monopolies since that's what maximizes value for shareholders.

Turns out "free markets" (by the econ 101 definition) are bad for capital owners so they try to have the markets be as not free as possible, I'm shocked they would do this (well, not that shocked)

  • PaulHoule  1 year ago

    See

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Definition

    to note that "Capitalism" is really a technical term from Marxist theory. Advocates of capitalism will never find a definition they accept because they want to have one that encompasses all the good (of which there is plenty) and rejects the bad (of which there is also plenty)

    Positing such as thing as "Capitalism" is positing that there could be some other system or that the current system could have an end. Advocates of the status quo really believe

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative

    want to treat prosystemic economics as a science like physics or chemistry, etc.

    If there is a way our system can claim to be better than others it is because we have competition in markets, politically, etc.

pessimizer  1 year ago

Capitalism, an undeniable driver of innovation, incentivizes firms to endlessly innovate ways to avoid competition. The only question is whether the anti-competitive innovation is more or less expensive than the innovation they'll have to do to compete.

It's not even really a question, it's a collective action problem, nominally hampered by price-fixing laws. Price-fixing laws are an indication that the desire to avoid competition is so strong and so dangerous that to slow it down we're willing to abridge the supposedly universal freedoms of speech and of association.

darby_nine  1 year ago

> Yeah, it's time for Google to be broken up into pieces because of anti-competitive laws and really get back to making America into a capitalistic society once again.

Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place? Seems to me that anti-competitive practices are the logical conclusion of privately-owned enterprise.

EDIT: to be clear, I'm very pro breaking up google. I'm just surprised that people are coming back around to the idea that government intervention is necessary to balance a stable economy with a private one.

  • Spooky23  1 year ago

    There’s a balance between allowing for the freedom to encourage innovative growth and regulatory regimes to govern behavior in more stable markets.

    We’d be using AT&T’s version of AOL for $150/mo without breakup of that company.