this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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That leads to a beauty of capitalism though. People prioritize profit, yes, but with competition, the way to make a profit is to be appealing to people. You make a profit by providing the best good or service at the best price. This means that the people who have the goal of profits also have the goal of pleasing their customers.
There's a quote from somewhere that goes something like this "capitalism takes the most ambitious, selfish, and capable people and forces them to stay up at night thinking about what everyone else wants".
"I studied economics in high school. Hear my wisdom."
Beauty of capitalism. God fucking take me now.
Rot in hell bootlicker
We have seem over and over again that companies will eventually become greedy and will kill all competition. One example Standard Oil , they will eventually not serve the customers as you mentioned. The customers will have to pay really high prices for lower quality service or product. I am not a lot into socialism because we come back to the same that one entity is controlling everything and we have seem also that the government sucks. So maybe a hybrid approach will be nice to try.
Insulin prices in the US is a great example of this. It's not about being competitive, it's about charging the absolute highest amount they can possibly get away with.
Insulin prices would be a lot lower if more people were allowed to produce and sell it.
It's not a question of not being allowed to produce it, it's anti-competitive practices by the pharmaceuticals industry, which capitalism rewards.
Source
Source
You are going to use medicine that some Joe made in his garage?
Monopolies are pretty dangerous, and I'd like to avoid then as much as possible.
I think that they're generally created and sustained by government intervention though. Bailouts, legal fees, red tape, price controls, exceedingly long copyrights, they all hurt new competitors more than established ones.
You should read Lenin's "Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", you're like 2 steps from it, just in this moment you try to turn back the clock instead of looking forward.
If one company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks then I'm going to buy someone else's bread and that company loses a lot of money.
If every company decided that the average bread should cost 50 bucks, that's an extraordinary opportunity for a new competitor to come in with reasonable prices.
One valid use of government power is punishing people who murder, and I'm not exactly sure what power cartels have outside of that.
I googled it and the Wikipedia page said they're inherently unstable, but I don't know how reliable that is.
In any case, I don't see how my second example isn't a cartel itself. All the bread companies are colluding to set the price of bread artificially high. The problem is there isn't much to stop new competitors (or to stop members defecting).