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this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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I’m open to learning. How does capitalism avoid the infinite concentration of wealth into the hands of one eventually?
Every system has flaws, to be sure - e.g. in Saudi Arabia, which is as anticapitalist as possible due to the government owning everything, all wealth is concentrated in the monarch - and capitalism is no exception. My answer to you has to be specific to certain types of goods, because for other types, capitalism will absolutely fail in the manner you describe and needs government regulation not to.
In this context, I will use "fail" to mean the failure you asked about, only 1 wealthy person.
Example where capitalism will generally not fail, and, in fact, has never failed in recorded history: restaurants. If our mysterious wealthy person attempts to own every restaurant simultaneously, someone else will open a rival restaurant and the plan will fail (and even if somehow no one could open a rival anywhere, people could choose to eat at home). No one in any country has ever managed to own every restaurant at once.
Example where capitalism will absolutely fail over time: oil. It is trivial, given enough time, for one person to eventually own all access to oil - Rockefeller is a great example of someone working hard at this, successfully.
I appreciate the thoughtful and intelligent response.
I will not move the goalposts and change 1 to some arbitrary small number. I will instead ask how do we prevent capitalism from concentrating wealth so much that, like a black hole, it overcomes degeneracy pressure and collapses, changing its own rules to benefit those at the very top and prevent the possibility of actual competition? This is the bastardization that we have today in the USA, and to me, this seems like the inevitable conclusion. It tends to concentrate wealth and power and to not be capitalism anymore. This extreme consolidation eventually warps its own mechanisms, becoming not very different from top-down, planned economy -- just a badly-designed, ad-hoc, self-serving one.
The reality is that economic systems aren't black and white. I don't think we have true unregulated capitalism anywhere, and you admit there are areas (like healthcare) where capitalism is truly stupid or easily reaches critical mass to prevent competition (like oil).
This is a such a strawman.
If only 1.000 persons owns all restaurants its stupidly bad too.
But that's not the question I was asked. Answering the question I was asked doesn't make my answer a strawman.