[scarmig]

So much of what we call "capitalism" is just creating authoritarian planned economies in the miniature and shrugging our shoulders and saying that it's all "private" so rights like free speech don't apply. And both factions of the elite who run the country like it that way.

[awb]

> shrugging our shoulders and saying that it's all "private" so rights like free speech don't apply

Centralized control over industry can have some pretty bad consequences too.

[gruez]

I think you missed the whole "capitalism" vs "planned economies" comparison entirely. The advantage of capitalism over planned economies isn't that it's democratic or whatever. It's that in capitalism, individual companies are allowed to fail if they perform poorly, whereas in a command economy it takes the entire country down.

[scarmig]

1) Within the United States, the largest corporations are closely associated with government, with a very porous interface between their highest levels. And they certainly aren't always allowed to fail.

2) Once a megacorporation has established dominance in a given market, a combination of network effects and regulatory capture removes competitive pressures. This allows the internal planned economy of the corporation to continue without competitive pressures. See e.g. Google, which essentially throws money earned through dominance in ad markets against the wall in every direction but produces little of new value.

The reason my "capitalism" has quotation marks is to point out that actually existing capitalism in the USA has pretty much nothing to do with competitive free markets.