Comment by zb3
6 hours ago
Sad to see some people still believe raw capitalism works and that they can "vote with their wallet".. but they don't see that all car manufacturers can just agree to enshittify their products the same way and use their position to ensure you won't just "start your own car company". There's no real choice and those in power don't care.
Only regulation can help.. or a revolution in case the political system in your country is broken..
Anti-competitive practices that you describe ("all car manufacturers can just agree") is definitely not a capitalistic thing (market competition being an important part of capitalism), and indeed regulation can improve the bad outcomes.
I think revolutions are more successful when there is some new idea of what to replace the system with. Currently I did not see anything remotely interesting (ex: french revolution came with the new idea of equality before the law, which was not the case before), and I think is mostly due to low overall education - you can't improve a system if most of the people do not think about complex issues like laws, taxes, efficiency, etc. Everybody loves to point a finger at someone and blame them (immigrants, rich people, woke people, etc.) like that would "miraculously" solve any issue.
I don't think there's a consensus about that, as demonstrated by divided opinions on EU DMA and Apple vs Epic.
The anti-regulation arguments aren't framed as "market competition is bad", but rather "the market will sort itself out without intervention" and "let companies do whatever they want to avoid killing innovation".