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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

This is capitalism working as intended. It's no an aberration. It's not a few bad apples. This is quite literally what capitalism is: it's building an enclosure and then jacking up the price. It's rent-seeking. It's regulatory capture.

Private equity is infecting every aspect of your life and the tactics are the same:

1. Cut costs;

2. Jack up the prices;

3. Block competition by buying them up, legislation/regulation, etc; and

4. Loading the entity up with debt and cash out before it explodes.

No value is being created or added. It's pure wealth extraction. Some cases are essentially state violence (eg buying up mobile home parks). Others are just downright immoral, like exploiting the love people have for their pets here.

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Many of your points are not capitalism so this is not capitalism working as intended.

so what’s the alternative to the free market?

It's not a free market. Capitalism is about capital accumulation, not fair markets in some sense.

You can have free markets without having an aristocracy.

You can’t have free markets if you use Motte and Bailey arguments to justify rejecting all forms of free markets, instead of just market failures.

you think the free market EVER existed? oh you sweet summer child. it has been owned and run by the ultra wealthy since day one. there is no "fair" with the free market, because not everything is equal. education, defense, banking, healthcare are not meant to turn a profit, but here we are.

I totally agree with you actually, but HN is pretty socialist these days and karma would go to negative in zero time.

Capitalism isn't the free market. Capitalism is actually a rather unfree market. Free markets would be better.

Free markets with high taxes.

"Free markets" are a myth.

The only way a market can function is with a strong government because markets require regulation and courts to function. They require a stable financial system. None of this is possible without government. Sorry to all the anarcho-capitalists.

Also, I didn't say "free markets". I said "capitalism". It's interesting that so many use these terms interchangeable and they're not interchangeable. For the longest time I knew people didn't know what socialism is. Thing is, most people don't actually know what capitalism is either.

Markets aren't predicated on capitalism. Markets exist in every economic system and predate capitalism by thousands of years. Capitalism is merely who gets to extract the surplus value of labor. In feudalism it went to lords and kings. In capitalism, it goes to capital owners. They're otherwise functionally equivalent. We've simply replaced the divine right of kings to deifying the ultra-wealthy.

EDIT: fixed typo

typo, you likely meant "Markets are NOT predicated on capitalism." right?

thanks, but I’m not buying anything.

This isn't capitalism. It's corporatism. The only reason this works is because of unnecessary regulation and red tape created by governments that enables regulatory capture by well-funded operators. A true free market would see these sort of operators outcompeted in 5 minutes.

So that's something you'd see where the state more or less has collapsed?

"Real capitalism has never been tried."

I thought Corporatism was the kind of socialised capitalism practiced in South Korea? In that mode large corporations act as the welfare state for employees while the corporation keeps redundancies to a minimum.

Private Equity is kinda the inverse of this where there is no paternalism at all from corporations.

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