who519 t1_j1zw72w wrote
Reply to comment by XiphosAletheria in Life is a game we play without ever knowing the rules: Camus, absurdist fiction, and the paradoxes of existence. by IAI_Admin
Ok, so let's say your are google, and you create this wonderful thing that meets an unmet need and makes you a ton of money. Then others see they could do something similar to make their own market share...you know what happens next, google/apple/coca-cola/mcdonalds etc...etc...do everything they can to annihilate the competition. They don't want to share that market, they want to own that market. Literally anything that threatens their growth will be destroyed, including politicians.
Capitalism even if you ignore its abuse of workers has to provide Profit to shareholders. The only way to continually get profits is to cut the costs that actually make your product good, healthy, useful etc... etc... So the endgame for the consumer is a shittier more dangerous product. Greed runs it all into the ground eventually.
XiphosAletheria t1_j1zyxe0 wrote
I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.
There are specific markets that tend towards natural monopolies, and these generally need some form of regulation to keep whatever company gets that monopoly in check. And of course individual actors within capitalism can behave badly, and need to be policed as humans always do. But there's a reason all the wealthiest countries use some version of regulated capitalism instead of some other system, and that's because once you understand that wealth is something to be produced and grown rather than a limited thing to be fought over, society gets a hell of a lot better.
Garacious t1_j203t4f wrote
What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth. In that case how can wealth be something that can be produced infinitely?
XiphosAletheria t1_j205nkd wrote
>What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth.
But that isn't true. If you sit down and write a good book, you have created something valuable that didn't exist before. The same is true if you program a videogame. Or write a hit song. And so on. There are plenty of ways to make society (and yourself) richer without someone else losing wealth. Likewise, the value of your phone lies less in the material resources that make it up and the labor put into to arranging those resources and more in the ingenuity of the idea behind how to arrange those resources. The same is true of most of the material goods we collectively would call "wealth".
Garacious t1_j207ik6 wrote
But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it. You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth. Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere. If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.
XiphosAletheria t1_j209a7h wrote
>But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it.
So? Nothing has inherent value to it. That doesn't mean you can't creste things people will find valuable.
>You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth.
Yes, right.
>Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere.
Of course it does. That is what all wealth is - stuff that people assigned an abstract value to. To create wealth you labor to create something or to do something that either a) at least a few people will put a high value on or b) that a lot of people will put a low value on.
>If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.
Sure, yes, of course. You might try to write a good book and produce crap. You might try to grow a crop of potatoes and overwater them so they all die. You might dig up a bunch of shiny rocks and discover no one wants them. You might compose a song and find no one wants to listen to it.
I said wealth can be produced and grown. I never said you personally had the skill and talent necessary to produce it, or that every effort to do so would succeed. Creating wealth is difficult. It has to be, because economic value is largely a function of scarcity.
Garacious t1_j20absv wrote
What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it. Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?
XiphosAletheria t1_j20i9li wrote
>What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it.
Why? You don't normally pay the author of a book you buy for the book before you buy it, do you?
>Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?
The same way one produces anything - through their own productive effort.
Garacious t1_j20j91a wrote
Okay let me ask something else, what do you think wealth is? Cause i feel like we are talking about completely different things. When i say wealth, i mean the money (or the capital) you own and i think a lot of people will agree with me on that. Also for the book example, you know preordering is a thing right?
XiphosAletheria t1_j20lufh wrote
Money isn't wealth - it's just a symbol for it, so you don't have to barter item for item. Wealth is what the money stands for - which is basically anything people are willing to trade you for.
Garacious t1_j20n53r wrote
So... capital. Money is a symbol for capital. Its amazing how much of a selective reader you are. Also if you read your own comment a few more times you can see that trade is an important element of wealth. People trade their wealth with each other, so no one actually creates wealth out of thin air.
VitriolicViolet t1_j221tw9 wrote
>I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.
you realise that half those examples own the competition right? the companies that own coke also own some 50% of global beverages (the other global player being the owners of suntory).
all markets tend toward monopoly, its the entire inevitable end point of capitalistic growth. all wealthy people want more wealth and the easiest way to get it is not innovation or competition but bribery, nepotism and corruption. as a class they bribe gov (hence why its so slow and inefficient, its paid to be) to give them access to captive markets and grant them regulatory capture to crush actual competition.
wealth is less produced and grown and more gamified and almost purely speculative (massive growth in the most captive markets ie food, housing, healthcare, energy and gov keeps letting the wealthy have more and more of it because both sides work for the investment class)
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