LogFAQs > #934780348

Capitalism in reality doesn't work. It's a game, a compeitition. You can win games. We've had to keep breaking the rules of the game to say "no, you can't do that or the game would end". Real capitalism doesn't do anything to stop monopolies or insider trading and companies have countinually found ways to annihilate any real chance of competition.

Look at fox and CNN. They both benefit from the appearance of competition. The back and forth, the lashing out, that's content, that keeps people watching. Rather than make their news channel the best most accurate most balanced, it's more effective to try and increase the number of people watching the news and playing to win isn't how you do that.

It's been a long time since capitalism worked the way you insinuate. Where companies compete for the benefit of the consumer. They've found ways to make the consumers life too difficult to make informed decisions, they've found very sketchy ways to keep out competition.

Look no further than ISPs. Plenty of places in the US you have them charging high prices for pitiful speeds compared to the rest of the world because they can. They have competition in these areas but the competition just chooses to split the pie and offers similarly awful rates. They've made sure being an ISP takes a massive entry cost that the unsatisfied end consumer can't possibly compete with and even smaller businesses have to go through so much red tape and deals they can't effectively compete. Who can compete? Mega corperations. Google fiber comes out in a few areas to show the US "hey, it's actually totally reasonable to pay like 100 bucks for gigabit internet speeds" which was literally more than 1000% better than comcast and charter.

So, what happens? Do comcast and charter with their bullshit psuedo monopoly call off their shit and offer competitive prices? Well, kinda, but only where they were actually forced to. They offered competing prices with google fiber in the areas google fiber was in and kept the old ridiculous rates in other areas. In those fiber areas, they lost tons of money, partly from splitting with another company but mostly because theres less money in the pot so to speak. The overall internet spending in those areas went down because it was cheaper. In fact, google would have made more money if they just offered the same service at the same bullshit price as comcast.

Competing on either cost or efficiency reduces the total wealth in that industry and thats just not as effective as sharing price gouged industries with a few other corporations. Providing the best, cheapest, most convenient product has no benefit to a company.

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