Comment by tw04
6 hours ago
> While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under
He seems to point pretty directly to Chinese subsidies allowing those printers to be sold under cost. That’s not capitalism.
Amazon operated under cost for years to capture the market, how is this any different?
Also partially subsidized by the government, who charged their mom-and-pop brick and mortar competitors sales tax while Amazon avoided subjecting their customers to sales tax for many years. That, plus Amazon's ability to operate at a seemingly perpetual loss, was absolutely predatory.
And the government sat on its hands and our representatives loved all the Prime boxes stacked at their doorstep. It has ensh#ttified entire industries that once depended upon retail as their interface with customers.
I think what you meant to say is "that is not an enforced fair and free market" which is much different than capitalism.
The free-market folks talk about something that works in theory as an ideal, but has never actually been put into practice.
How's it not capitalism? If your definition of capitalism requires governments to either not exist or not act to improve the conditions of their subjects (including companies), you have a definition of capitalism where basically none existing or only failed states have a capitalist system.
It is. Maybe not the capitalism you like.
Not much different that using ChatGPT/any commercial LLM. They are not really profitable. They want to capture the market.
Private companies spending (and potentially wasting) money investors voluntarily gave them because they think it may lead to a big payoff down the road is capitalism.
Companies doing the "same thing" with government handouts (where the ultimate source of the money had no say in the matter) is not.
It's like the difference between companies that hire workers and those that use slave labor. They may have otherwise identical business models, but the later are operating at an unfair advantage.
1 reply →