I love the other comments you made, but I want to point out one other thing: How did those privileges come about? That is, what were the conditions that led to the government taking the power to grant companies de facto monopolies?
In some cases, it was an unintended consequence of political conditions. For example, private insurers came to rule our healthcare system because of a cap on income to raise funds for WW2. In order to get around this cap, employers offered non-cash benefits and the rest is history. Libertarians love this one, it’s pretty cut and dry that a form of socialism shot itself in the foot.
However, there are many other cases where it was an unintended consequence of regulation written in blood. An easy and popular example is the FDA. Making food and adhering to food regulations at scale is definitely something that requires so much up front capital that it has been favoring existing corporations for quite a while, leading to a relatively small number of companies controlling a huge portion of the food supply. But that regulation came about because companies large and small, unfettered and unrestricted, were adulterating the food or cutting dangerous corners to maximize profit. The solution can’t just be less regulation, those same companies will continue to dominate but now with the ability to outright feed us poison while buying or otherwise destroying any competition.
dx1@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I used to land at basically this analysis myself, but there are definitely some assumptions that need to be addressed. We can probably agree that to a significant degree “money is power”, or at least, money can elicit power, especially in terms of directing the actions of the desperate. We witness in our society - which is not pure “free market capitalism” - that inequality is rampant. There are theoretical explanations for this blaming both government intervention and just simply the behavior of individuals within the market that centralize wealth. And, conversely, there are theoretical explanations for how government can decentralize wealth, or how market participants can decentralize wealth (including boycotts, unions, etc.). The biggest challenge with this age-old “communism vs. capitalism” debate is that establishing overall tendencies for state vs. private actors requires exhaustive historical analysis, and is not even inherent to the nature of either actor, i.e., someone as a private actor, or state actor, can act in a way that either centralizes or decentralizes wealth. The only overarching principle you can even safely state is that the actions of a state are distinct from those as a private actor because of the “monopoly on violence” factor, i.e., the ability to enforce unfair demands that people can’t escape in practice (a behavior that leftie types usually accuse capitalism of, inversely, by pointing to corporate monopoly power - which of course, depends on the dictates of a state or equivalent body to enforce).
The only way I was able to resolve the problems with this whole analytical framework - communism, capitalism, state, private - was to reject this terminology entirely and perform the analysis in terms of individual behavior, actions, inanimate vs. animate, and the ethical properties deriving from those. A “state” is a useful abstraction at times and a confusing complication at other times. “Capitalism” and “communism” as terms have no universally agreed upon definition, resulting in unproductive, endless, circular debates. What we’re really trying to do is design a social system that maximizes outcomes for every criteria we like - equality, prosperity, individual wellbeing, health, lack of environmental externalities, etc.
Juice@midwest.social 5 months ago
Did you just throw communism under the bus to promote Marxism? Bravo BTW, I’ll probably steal your last paragraph
C126@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Great read, thanks for thoughtful content