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Comment by bloppe | Hacker News Reader

> If others have something to buy your product with, you've not taken all, fundamentally.

Are you saying that winner-take-all markets are incompatible with capitalism? I'm confused

What suggests an incompatibility? Allowing private ownership of capital can absolutely support a winner-take-all situation. One private entity can own all the capital just fine, technically speaking. Many capitalism naysayers even use that situation as the canonical example of the peril of capitalism.

In reality the people would likely revolt by no longer recognizing private ownership of capital if that were to happen, but technically they don't have to. If they truly believe in capitalism — or, as it pertains to the discussion, there is an army forcing them to believe — they can continue to uphold the right for that private entity to own all the capital.

I take it you have a pretty specific perspective on capitalism, but most would say it can't really exist without a free market.

What is certain is that that we've never seen a free market in recorded human history. By the time the idea was invented we already had power structures in place that would never stand for a free market. Of course, the concept also has a number of unsolved practical problems which would prevent a free market from emerging in the real world even if everything else perfectly fell into place. Once markets were invented they were incorporated alongside existing systems, leaving the mixed economy we practice today the world over. An interesting thought experiment it is, but bold to think that private ownership of capital is dependent on that thought experiment. Especially given that most people seen here seem to believe that they actually can privately own capital despite the lack of a free market.

For the sake of discussion, if we entertain your thought, that means capitalism also doesn't exist beyond a thought experiment, which questions why it was brought into this discussion? Whether or not a winner-take-all-future is compatible with that thought experiment with no actual grounding doesn't mean anything, does it?

You can certainly redefine concepts to the point that they stop making sense!

> What is certain is that that we've never seen a free market in recorded human history.

You should really try working in cloud. We're constantly negotiating prices with vendors and customers, and I can tell you that free markets do exist. Our customers churn all the time because they have meaningful choice, and our margins reflect that, and whenever one of our vendors tries to gouge us, you better believe we piss right off!

> You can certainly redefine concepts to the point that they stop making sense!

Is this intended as a warning about the rest of the comment?

> You should really try working in cloud.

I don't do well with heights, I'm afraid. But more seriously, I do. I don't need to negotiate with a police force to protect it, so clearly there isn't a free market. But even if you want to pervert what a free market is by cherrypicking some things you like from it while ignoring everything else, I still don't see how you would ever consider the cloud to be free. It is marred by things like copyright and patents that make free exchange untenable.

> Our customers churn all the time because they have meaningful choice, and our margins reflect that

Is this humorous story intended to be an arbitrary tangent or something related to the rest of the discussion? The best interpretation I can come up with is that you are trying to use this story to explain that your cloud activities exist in a market, which is no doubt true — most economic activities have converged on markets in our modern world, but you haven't given anything to suggest it is within a free market. Even non-free markets have choice. So obviously that couldn't be your intention. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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