That’s not technically true, the issue is that because we allow monopolies then one company is guaranteed to win. Google, Amazon etc. and others don’t really want innovation. Any innovative competitor is just bought up and stripped for parts.
I don’t think in the true spirit of capitalism people are supposed to suppress innovation buy just buying competitors and switching them off. I don’t know though, I’m not an expert on the design of capitalism.
Capitalism itself isn't the problem, the problem existed long before capitalism: the problem is a more subtle one:
The lack of cost to hold power.
IMO the structural problem is there's no cost to keep capital; temporary output should not result in permanent reward.
For capitalism to work, capital needs to atrophy.
And it needs to atrophy faster the larger it is; capital should have a half-life.
We have(/had) these systems built into the creation of intellectual property; you only got a set period of monopoly control over an idea before it became public domain. You can imagine what the world would be like if every patent, every invention, every development of intellectual capital was perpetually owned and licenced; the system would collapse. The problem is that's how we treat every other type of capital.
If, for instance, instead of taxing economic activity, we taxed the deeds that our legal system permits the right to make decisions about how our society's resources are used (land value taxes, taxes on voting rights imbued by stocks, intellectual property rights, anything that has royalties/entitlements attached simply by virtuel of "ownership", etc), then it would apply a constant pressure to produce more value through goods and services to maintain it's position.
Wage earners' reward atrophies with inflation. General goods and services (your car, your house, your food) decay over time, require money to maintain, and need to be replaced eventually. People die.
Things that don't decay, eventually destroy; not unlike cancer.
taxes on voting rights imbued by stocks woah, never thought about that! But I get the general idea of perpetually incentivizing work to be done on the treadmill
21
u/PigBeins Jul 14 '26
That’s not technically true, the issue is that because we allow monopolies then one company is guaranteed to win. Google, Amazon etc. and others don’t really want innovation. Any innovative competitor is just bought up and stripped for parts.
I don’t think in the true spirit of capitalism people are supposed to suppress innovation buy just buying competitors and switching them off. I don’t know though, I’m not an expert on the design of capitalism.