this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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i think you're missing it. Government for as glacial and corrupt and corruptible as it is, is the only buffer from the excess of a free market.
businesses without a guardrail HAVE proven they will sacrifice everything, literally everything in the name of profit.
Oil companies have know for about a century that they are destroying the planet and they are *still * doing it. They fight every regulation that stops them tooth and nail. They buy and shelve technologies that would cut into their profit. Imagine a world where there was no one trying to stop them at all?
That is the proper diagnosis of our system. We have allowed unaccountable immoral groups to control the means of production and they are literally using it to with kill us all.
I'm not missing it, that's just a different point. I don't disagree with everything you say here, it just doesn't really address or refute anything I said. I stuck with the topical example of helpful medicine, which is demonstrably controlled by corporations and the state. Thus, it is not at all capitalist.
Reminder: profit does not mean capitalist, market does not mean capitalist. Public bodies can act in and/or control markets, and they can make profit. That's not a private thing
Okay, let's do it explain how in a "pure" capitalist society a public body, without the ability to at least nominally use a legal system to guard against collusion and monopoly using the threat of breaking up or shutting down corporations, provide any protection?
Giving them the power to do that makes them just a government by another name.
You literally directly quoted me saying that it seemed like you thought I was advocating for pure capitalism, and now you are directly asking me to defend pure capitalism. You are trying incredibly hard to straw man me into something I'm not, and I would like you to stop that.
This conversion will go no where unless you actually want to respond to things I'm saying, so please let me ask you directly about what I was actually saying: is it appropriate to blame capitalism when a public corporation in collusion with the government is at fault for an issue? If not, why?
I guess i'm getting that from when you first said,
I just assumed you were defending a "truly free market" capitalism.
to address what you just posted,
yes, capitalism creates the conditions for that collusion. It allows entities with the only goal of profit at any cost.
removing the government doesn't reduce that corruption it just allows it to go unchecked without even an illusion of protection to the public.
Focus on what capitalism means when you say this, and focus on the context you're saying this in. Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, and we are discussing medicine. So, what you're saying, is that the private control of medicine created the conditions for government collusion with a public corporation, This does not make sense, because public corporations are not private. This is corporatism, not capitalism.
Then it's the governments job to allow private entities some avenue to produce medicine. They can do so by not enforcing patents on helpful medicine that empowers corporations.