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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

> pure capitalism is harmful as well,

It's not like we have ever experienced it. We have never seen capitalism running free without major State intervention. At best we get Crony capitalism these days which is nothing like "pure capitalism".

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We have, back on 1600s when joint stock companies were first invented, eg Dutch East India Company. They had their own armies and we got slavery, colonisation of Philippines, India and other places, all through private, profit-driven enterprise.

You can say we have had the very same thing with full state Powers that had nothing to do with Capitalism, since the beginning of History, so putting it on the back of "Capitalism" is kind of tenuous. Anybody or any organization in a position of ultimate power will go in that kind of behavior. Plus, the East India Company was pretty much a proxy for States involved in the area.

The point of capitalism is that you are supposed to have a lot more competition because of fragmentation.

I think the opposite is true. Pure capitalistic free market naturally tends towards monopoly or collusion. State intervention is needed to ensure competition.

And then corporate interests collude through and ultimately control the state, and we've arrived at an interesting system of two party democratic republican fascism

I think we came close in the 19th century.

Any market based system starts to break down in terms of efficiency and value when there isn’t a robust competitive environment. It really requires small players. Look into any major corporation for an example — internally they look more like a command economy than a rich marketplace.

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