this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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In a classic example you have a village with 2 bakeries, one of the bakers came up with a machine to kneed the bread, so he can make more bread and sell it cheaper. This is sort of the story people tell to show how great capitalism is.
But we have reached a point where that one bakery now owns a chain of bakers, adds ingredients to the bread to make it more addictive, skips on actual ingredients needed for bread and replaces them with sawdust, made donations to the current political party so any competition has to jump through hoops to get a bakery license, etc.
Capitalism only works if it's regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.
Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it's regulating. You can't have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.
A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we've come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn't really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.
Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.
Exactly, this is why strong laws are needed. In the end we (the people) all benefit. Maybe a small example but when the EU started to push for usbc as the only standard, it made things lot better. If you are older and still have a drawer with 15 chargers all with different plugs, voltages and amps you known what I mean. Back in the day before cheap chargers from aliexpress, just replacing a simple charger from the manufacturer could be a pretty expensive thing.
I've been through at least 5 different kinds of phone chargers over the years. Starting with the olde-fashioned coaxial power connector, then going to various versions of USB, and at least 2 kinds of Apple proprietary connectors. Standardizing on USB-C is great. I just hope that they're able to update it in 10-20 years when USB-C is fully out of date.