this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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That's funny because Trump isn't a capitalist. In an open market, his businesses fail. He needs government interferencey China style.
Capitalism =/= free market
There's a fundamental contradiction in the definition of a free market. To some, it means a competitive market. To some, it means an unregulated market. But there can be no competitive market without regulation: without regulation, it almost immediately degenerates into oligopoly and anticompetitive market-rigging among the players. Businesses hate nothing more than they hate competition.
That great cheerleader of capitalism Adam Smith (the original guy, not the twat using his name now) knew that.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
That's from his classic work, The Wealth of Nations.
Exactly, if the demand isn't/can't be flexible (eg healthcare, housing) then no matter the amount of competition on the supply side will balance things out in an unregulated market in the long term.
Everyone with the freedom of choice is on the supply side, and everyone on that side benefits from higher prices.
And there is no other metric of success other than profit.
(Nobody has the incentive to undercut the competition unless for later monopoly reasons. But the same manoeuvre can be achieved cheaper via mergers without the loss of revenue due to lower margins.)
That's why healthcare was a problem (with a constantly giant inflation) in the USA even before all the consolidations.
And former eastern block =/= communism.
I obviously used the mainstream meaning of that word.
Fact is, Trump opposes free market capitalism because he's a terrible business man.
I remember running around twenty years ago asking people (generally educated successful people) how they define capitalism.
Most people are not 100% sure, so they usually guess some form of market and blend it with consumerism.
My guess is that most of this came from Mikhail Gorbachev advertising for Pizza Hut.
One simple definition of capitalism is making money from ownership instead of from work.
That's a very narrow definition of capitalism. If free markets hinder the main function of the capitalist system (accumulating capital at the top), it will be eroded and abolished. Monopolies for example are much more profitable than competetive situations. Getting rid of or circumventing open market competition is always good business.