this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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You say "broken promises" I say "the plan all along" and "bait and switch".
Yep. The business model has always been "Lure them in and stifle competition with a low initial cost. Then when we have the market we can jack up the price." Enshitification at its best.
This is just capitalism at work. Capitalism = enshitification, exploitation, and destruction.
Literally working as intended. Not sure why it takes people so long to figure this out.
A healthy dose of western/capitalist propaganda since birth and until death helps a lot. So many people under the illusion that this is the natural progression of civilization, or the best.
When you've been exposed to nothing but capitalsm your whole life it's incredibly hard to be convinced that anything else could even work. Just like people born into religious cults, it's hard to break when it's all you've known.
Growing up in the '70s and '80s in the US, I know that the "greatest country on earth" propaganda worked on me. It took me until my 30s before I kind of looked around and said,"What the fuck is going on here?"
Cue Will MacAvoy's speech in The Newsroom.
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So much propaganda some people think that if a government offers public services they are about to be sent to a gulag.
It's just impossible to have a conversation about anything here, isn't it?
Capitalism without any regulation*
Yeah but then the wealthy eventually start buying away regulation. The only thing that made capitalism get under any sort of control was fear of a worker’s revolution
Yep, and so they made capitalism global, exported all of the union jobs to countries where labor abuse is permitted or encouraged, and then created new categories of unorganized, exploitative jobs faster than labor could keep up with them.
Even well-regulated capitalism strives for this and somehow manages to achieve it. It is the nature of capitalism.
It is in the nature of power. Reducing this to a particular economic system is nearsighted.
Every social system with a power dynamic (i.e. a system with two or more people in it) is vulnerable to power abuse. Power blinds, blindness strips powerful of perspective, decisions made without good information drunk-walk towards ruin.
The only common thing is the fact that it’s the average Jane who suffers first and whose rage ends up counteracting the ruin.
I will agree that it is the nature of power. But I will argue that few other economic systems actively facilitate (and actually reward) the concentration of power the way capitalism does. I'll also point out you are basically resorting to a "whataboutism" argument.
That explains… a lot. I apologize for wasting your time.
If its actually well regulated it wont be capitalism. Just like Europe has many kingdoms yet isnt full of actual monarchy.
All capitalism is, at its core, is the system of owning and investing capital for greater returns later. You can have that while regulating things--at least in theory.
An actual dictionary definition of capitalism:
Any definition of capitalism that doesn't in some way mention private ownership of capital is simply wrong.
So your issue is that I didn't use the word "private" in my write-up?
Yes. If you leave out that part you're just describing human behavior in general.
Also known as the Wal-Mart business model.
A lot of these things were proudly unprofitable, which is basically their way of getting around anti-trust violations. If they had a revenue stream to make the business profitable (outside of investors handing them more cash) then they'd be hit with anti-trust lawsuits for offering services at a loss in order to drive the competition out of business. But instead they just convince investors to hang on long enough to achieve the same goal, then raise their prices when they've got too much power to fail.
"Rent seeking" has a nice ring to it in this case, I think. The previous situation was fine, except for not being profitable enough for the right people.
Yeah it’s called capitalism