There's a growing sentiment in the US that capitalism in general and consumerism in particular are inherently bad and cause only hardship and exploitation for the general public.

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verisimi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

... whereas the truth is ...?

	▲	Gormo 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That "capitalism" and "consumerism" are abstract concepts that represent pre-existing patterns of human activity that arise from a priori motivations, and are not things that exist as entities unto themselves exerting an influence on anyone's behavior or situational outcomes.

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shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Capitalism is not inherently bad as such.

Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.

What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).

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Arainach 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The market abhors competition. The free market, absent government regulation, will always trend towards anticompetitive consolidation because it's far more profitable.

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Gormo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Individual participants in the market may abhor competition, but the market itself is made of competition.

Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.

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Arainach an hour ago | parent [-]

This (being made of competition) has never happened in practice. What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.

	▲	Gormo 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> This (being made of competition) has never happened in practice. So there is no theory/practice distinction here, because there is no applicable theory -- it's all just a description of manifest reality. Markets just are ecosystems of people engaging in value-for-value exchange with each other, and competition just is an inherent characteristic of them that's observable in reality. > What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc. Negotiating exclusive contracts is a way of securing long-term business from a customer, motivated by a desire to prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor -- naturally, customers don't sign such agreements unless there's something in it for them. Buying out competitors is only possible if there are competitors to buy out, which means there aren't barriers to entry, and other firms can target your weaknesses, which you're seeking to compensate for by gaining the market position of a firm that's been successful at doing so. If you can't maintain that position, someone else will fill it -- if they couldn't then the competitor you're acquiring couldn't have done it in the first place. Paying for ads is a method of trying to win customers' business in a competitive environment. If you didn't have competition, you wouldn't need to advertise. Everything you're listing here are methods by which firms engage in competition with each other. Every single item on your list is a tactic used by firms because they are in a competitive environment.

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komali2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Cory Doctorow wrote about this: "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"

> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...

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BSDobelix 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Capitalism is not inherently bad as such.

Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.

>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.

Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)