this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
1350 points (98.4% liked)
Political Memes
8708 readers
2545 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most often it's about who owns the factories, but yeah, all of it comes into play. For example, there's limited land to get resources, and how did people come to own it? (Check out What is Property? by Proudhon.)
Barriers of entry is the issue. Say you want to create a competitor to YouTube. You don't just say the words and sign a document and have a competitor. No, you need massive datacenters, deals with ISPs, land, power, employees. That's billions of dollars needed, and then you need to have people visit too, and how are you going to compete with Google for that?
This is similar for most industries. You want to make a car company? Same story. Sure, you can start a restaurant, but not much larger unless you're already a billionaire or have some very good connections.
Even if you can effectively compete with existing companies, they have the connections and access to make it harder for you to fairly compete in the market. They'll make sure companies don't carry your product or do business with you, and they have the capital to undercut you and take a loss until you can't remain solvent. This is what happens on Amazon constantly. Someine releases a product, Amazon copies it and sells it cheaper until the original seller can't continue, then they raise the prices.
Even under capitalism we do this. They're called "not-for-profits."
No, you need revenue. Profit is income - expenses. If it's neutral that isn't profit. For example, everything after cost of production can go to employees. That leaves you no profit.
The idea is to create a system where people aren't trying to maximize profit. You want everyone creating for the greater good. There are a lot if competing ideas on how to do this. Even if it won't ever be perfect, neither is what we have now. Nothing will ever be perfect.