Capitalism and its discontents

Capitalism and free enterprise have produced a lot of stuff I like. However in the current system of oligarchy and monopoly, the competition that’s supposed to ensure good outcomes for everyone ain’t happening. Eyewear, for example, costs far more than it should because the industry is down to a few key players. It’s also the reason groceries keep getting more expensive. And in some cases, medical procedures.

It doesn’t help that the current climate in Washington is by and large pro-business. If there’s no support for busting business even when they commit crimes, and none for opposing monopoly, it’s inevitable the rich get richer and the big corporations get bigger. Though Republicans are perfectly happy to fight business for being too liberal and “woke.” Florida’s CFO is questioning one company for pulling out of homeowners insurance in the state but has to blame it on wokeness. Questioning capitalism would be a bridge too far, I guess. Sen. Rick Scott blames it on fraud but he means evil customers cheating the noble insurers, ignoring the probability that insurers are defrauding customers.

A related problem is that business is increasingly unresponsive to complaints, or abandons you to a chatbot. One woman invested in a house she hoped to pay for partly by renting it on AirBnB; the company dropped her and resists course-correcting. Greyhound Bus tickets are often entirely digital so if there’s a computer glitch, you’re screwed.

A lot of the issues, I suspect, come from existing in a culture where returns to investors are held up as the only moral good (as touched on in some of the links above). So to avoid any loss of revenue, oil companies give lip service to fighting climate change, then do nothing. Businesses insist that standards protecting workers from heat exhaustion are unnecessary and complicated and dammit, why shouldn’t they be able to work employees to death if it’s good for the bottom line (my interpretation, not their words).

For older investors it may be like Louis XV dismissing the consequences of his spendthrift ways: “apres moi, le deluge” (after me, the flood) Rupert Murdoch is 90; no matter that he’ll leave the world much worse than he found it, he’ll escape most of the consequences.

Another aspect, as Paul Krugman puts it, is that “Tech bros appear to be especially susceptible to brain-rotting contrarianism.” They’re smart and lucky enough to become rich, often by beating conventional wisdom, which makes them think someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his crackpot vaccine theories might be right after all (which is not how science works). It’s very easy to build themselves an echo chamber reaffirming their own genius. And being rich and successful makes it tempting to go Dunning-Krueger and imagine you can grasp lots of stuff outside your field of expertise easily (I see a lot of that in Mensa). And if someone points out the emperor has no clothes, threaten to sue them!

Then there’s fraud, which in this particular case (companies selling overpriced gold — buy before the economy collapses!) gets advertised on Fox News, Ted Cruz’ podcast and multiple other seemingly respectable (if you’re a conservative) venues. Any qualms Cruz or Fox have about this (I’m not sure they have any) are assuaged by the money, and being immune from any liability (“If an advertiser blames their legal troubles on ‘the woke mob,’ she said, ‘you’re often allowed to believe them.'”). More about right-wing fraud here.

I’ll switch gears slightly here and note that as far as the economy collapsing, “Bidenomics” has performed well over all. Inflation has come down, Biden’s very pro-labor and he’s found a workaround for SCOTUS rejecting his student-loan forgiveness plan. Nevertheless, as noted at the link, he may not be getting credit for it (a lot of the commenters disagree with the OP’s interpretation of why). Tech bros (again) are convinced the good economy is government propaganda — recession is imminent! Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy goes even more delusional, agreeing with a questioner’s theory that the Federal Reserve just adds zeroes to bank accounts of the government’s allies.