| ▲ | dathinab 5 hours ago | |
yes but it's more complicated like if you look at original reasoning why capitalism is a good match for democracy you find arguments like voting with money etc. _alongside with what things must not be tolerated in capitalism_ or it will break. And that includes stuff like: - monopolies, (or more generic anything having too much market power and abusing it, doesn't need to be an actual monopoly) - unfair market practices which break fair competition - situations which prevent actual user choice - to much separation of the wealth of the poorest and richest in a country - giving to much ways for money to influence politics - using money to bare people from a fair trail/from enforcing their rights - also I personally would add in-transparency, but I think that only really started to become a systemic issue with globalization and the digital age. This also implies that for market wich have natural monopolies strict regulation and consumer protection is essential. Now the points above are to some degree a check list of what has defined US economics, especially in the post-Amazone age (I say post Amazone age as the founding story of Amazone was a mile stone and is basically the idea of "let's systematically destroy any fair competition and used externally sourced money (i.e. subsidization) to forcefully create a quasi monopoly", and after that succeeded it became somewhat of the go-to approach for a lot of "speculative investment" founding). Anyway to come back to the original point. What we have in the US has little to do with the idea of capitalism which lead to the adoption of it in the West. It's more like someone took it is twisting it into the most disturbing dystopian form possible, they just aren't fully done yet. | ||
| ▲ | slg 5 hours ago | parent [-] | |
>- giving to much ways for money to influence politics I think what we're learning is that mass (social) media means that this simply isn't preventable in a world with free speech. Even if the US had stricter campaign finance laws in line with other western democracies, there still needs to be some mechanism so that one rich guy (or even a collection of colluding rich guys) can't buy a huge megaphone like Twitter or CBS. As long as there is no upper limit on wealth accumulation, there is no upper limit on political influence in a capitalistic democracy with free speech. Every other flaw you list is effectively downstream of that because the government is already susceptible to being compromised by wealth. | ||