You could write a book about this topic. You could write 100 books on it. In fact, if you Google this term, you get 5,780,000 results for why capitalism doesn't work.
One of the problems is that companies in any given industry are more likely to copy each other than they are to differentiate - particularly when copying ways to screw regular people out of their money. Now, I don't know about you, but for me something is lost from the concept of "competition" when everyone is doing the same thing.
At that point, it's just about who has a better brand campaign or customer-facing gimmick. If there is any competition, it's centered around doing a better job screwing the common man without losing him as a customer. Even then, as I said, whatever works gets copied by all.
Just take Banks for example. The Banks were ALL writing shitty loans and pooling them into big funds, decoupling them from the loan originator, and selling them on the open market over and over again. They ALL did it and now we own them and their ill-considered debt.
Then there's credit card companies who ALL charge fees willynilly, all raise rates quietly and whenever they feel like it, all hide their right to do all of this in the legal mousetype that nobody understands. The late-fee is its own industry worth $9 billion. If there's money to be made, they will find a way to suck it out of you. All of them. You don't hear about the HONEST BROKER credit card company.
The oil industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the food industry...I mean pick one and there's probably an obvious symptom showing that it's hostile to the common man. But if said common man wants or needs that kind of thing, they really have no choice but to submit to some form of micro-torture. You get the phone tree and hold musak, you get the made-up surcharges, you get lies about the safety of their products, you get denied coverage that you paid for, and you get misled EVERY time. Yet here's capitalism dancing off the tongues of our leaders with it's promise of choice, of competition, of market forces making everything better and better. It's bullshit. We're going backwards.
With the erosion of common decency, honor, and humanity out there in corporate-land, life for us "consumers" is getting more and more diabolically inconvenient, inexplicably expensive, and systematically confusing. It's a bit like being mugged, actually. Every single day.
Now, some might say that capitalism is the best thing out there...and I wouldn't disagree. But it also doesn't really work. So as Americans, I would think that it's in our nature to want to tweak it or re-invent it. Make it work better. Or at least develop some controls around it that compensate for the excesses. Something to protect us from the parasitic minority of aristocratic families marginalizing all of us to sharecropper status and sticking us in beige cubicles for the rest of our lives.
Or we can wait for things to get so bad that pretty much anything would be better than capitalism. Also an option. Thoughts?
Let's ask the robot.
Stumble It!