Ethical people act ethically and tend to stay far away from the unethical.
It follows that unethical people will this group together to commit their unethical conspiracies. See the Political parties, big oil, pharma, insurance, the fed, hedge funds, etc.
Ethical people have been self selecting out of these lucrative industries forever. What’s left are the clueless and the criminal.
I wouldn't say it's a capitalism problem but more of the erosion of a free market.
Anything that is counter to a free market rewards unethical behaviors. But politicians don't need to be bought. It's just what has been tolerated. This is a great enabler and you can see this with the SEC as just one example.
Regulatory capture occurs [1] and the megacorps infiltrate. People want to get ahead and they hide behind these megacorps, many of which have unethical behavior pushed by the leadership, investors, their boss, and sometimes even condoned by in-house lawyers. If there is no risk to shareholder value and no risk of personal charges, they will do it.
We need some criminal charges levied and some extreme fines. Maybe just set the fines to equal the money they stash overseas? It HAS to grossly outweigh the economic gain from the behavior, so that it's a big hit to shareholder value. [1]
There are always rewards for unethical behaviors, which is why people engage in them. This is true whether the framework is communism, capitalism, or marriage.
Competition encourages the unethical behaviors and punishes the ethical behaviors. Set the competition knob to 0, everyone slacks, crank it to 11, and everyone cheats.
Despite the fact that managing this balance is fundamental to a capitalist society, it's extremely typical for the latter half of this balance to be ignored, for competition to be framed as an unmitigated positive, and for the Goodhart's Law side of it to be completely swept under the rug.
Culpability should be attributed both to the individual and to the system. Otherwise it's easy to construct systems that bypass responsibility. Like we see here.
I feel like what differs is what type of unethical behaviors different systems encourage.
Capitalism encourages screwing over other people, being cutthroat in business, etc.
Communism encourages different faults, such as passivity, mob mentalities, and not taking responsibility.
Anarchism would discourage considering the effects of 2nd-order+ consequences.
The competition knob is but one knob among many. It's the one America happens to have at about an 8.5 (and one which I dislike greatly), but I don't think this problem is unique to capitalism.
>The competition knob is but one knob among many. It's the one America happens to have at about an 8.5 (and one which I dislike greatly), but I don't think this problem is unique to capitalism.
Given the levels of consolidation we've seen over the past 30 years or so, I'd say that a lack of competition also contributes to unethical behavior. In fact, the consolidation pursued by many corporations is predicated on swallowing up even potential competitors in an effort to consolidate their dominant position.
If you don't follow the perverse incentive du jour in a decentralized system, you'll get rolled.
We're drifting off topic, though. If Amazon heavily incentivizes bad behavior, should they be allowed to reap the rewards and discharge the blame? Absolutely not. They're culpable.
It follows that unethical people will this group together to commit their unethical conspiracies. See the Political parties, big oil, pharma, insurance, the fed, hedge funds, etc.
Ethical people have been self selecting out of these lucrative industries forever. What’s left are the clueless and the criminal.