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Comment by xixixao | Hacker News Reader

I have never seen even a simple argument for why your second paragraph should be true.

On the other hand I understand the principle that money makes more money (the principle of investment and ROI), and I don't see how "competitive market" tackles this.

It basically feels like the capitalism starts off from fairly-level playing field, but over time becomes more and more unstable, the gap ever-widening. We have already seen it fall (at the beginning of communist regimes), and I'm afraid we'll see it fall again.

That's a pessimist view, which I hope won't turn out to be true, but I'd be interested in exploring alternatives.

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> the principle that money makes more money (the principle of investment and ROI), and I don't see how "competitive market" tackles this.

It doesn't address that because it doesn't make that argument, in that way. One of its starting axioms is that economy is a positive sum game. In the case of your statement, it might argue that (in the very general sense) money makes more money in a positive sum way -- more total wealth in the economy. Then to the latter it merely says that business that are better at making money (and generally, wealth) get to out compete those that don't. Its premise is it optimizes for wealth creation of the entire economy. I think that's the place to take the argument -- either that you fundamentally disagree with that premise or some outcome of it.

> It basically feels like the capitalism starts off from fairly-level playing field

Historically I don't think so. I"m not expert but read a lot and I'm currently under the impression that economies were historically locked down by government or tightly coupled government / mercantile entities.

> Historically I don't think so.

WWII was a great leveling of the playing field. There are many times in history when Gini coefficients dropped precipitously. All the evidence points to the fact that wealth tends to accumulate in capitalist economies until crises or government intervention prevents it.

In truly competitive markets it wouldn't be so easy to park money for guaranteed returns.

isn't it pretty hard by now, BTW? Look at all these negative return rates in huge banks.

Look at insane bull markets last couple of years. Rich people don’t have their money just parked in bank accounts. They own real estate, land, stocks so they benefit greatly while majority of population benefits very little from ever higher highs in the stock market. Basically rich people control most of the stuff which generates passive income without the need of labour which causes ever widending gap between the rich and everybody else and shrinking of middle class.

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