The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency. Once that is reached and natural monopolies start to form, they should be socialized into non-profit utilities.
When the only goal left is enshittification and profiteering, it’s time to gobble them up.
We don’t have to have a race to the bottom, we can get the government to freeze things at the peak and keep them there.
We just need a mechanism to break that up again if it stagnates.
The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency.
You can do that under socialism as well. The problem with capitalism isn’t the competition to generate maximum efficiency, it’s the monopolization of that efficiency for profit rather than actual good. Why should we rely on the private sector to do what is best for society when publicly traded socialist companies can do the same without the dragon hoarding?
Groups generally do not generate the initial idea, don’t execute the initial vision, and are less agile to do so. There should be some incentive for individuals to drive their ideas for a time, and to benefit from that disproportionately, again for a time.
Businesses need to go through a few stages: startup regulation to establish a fair profit window, evaluation of an ongoing competitive window, and lastly a review of consolidation and convergence and conversion to a public utility.
The idea that some system can be setup such that everyone benefits all the time from some individual’s IP is pie in the sky, but we can certainly greatly improve the hoarding issue. The absolute most important part of that is to decouple big business ownership and power from an individual back into the government, since that’s where the excess influence ends up anyway.
Socializing them would be a boon sure, but I can’t name a single major monopoly that is at any sort of “peak” that couldn’t be re-implemented better if we started from scratch.
Our country has been stagnating in many areas for decades now and the competition that occurred in the past did not push us to realize “general maximum efficiency” - it pushed us to realize a corporate hellscape, with billionaires drinking our human rights like they would a fine wine.
You don’t start it from scratch, you take away the profit motive by folding it into the political machine as a utility. People still work there, it’s still run in a similar fashion, but you take away the stocks and speculation and decision making and regulate it back to the people either via wages or 100% profit tax rate.
We need high speed rail for freight and transit. We need actual chip/etc. manufacturing in the US, especially for individuals and (non-monopoly scale) commercial applications. We need facilities to process various materials e.g. rare earths and we need to focus on extracting these resources ourselves without slavery or child slavery, or raping the earth. We need to manufacture our own consumer goods sustainably, instead of exploiting people in other countries. We need to invest into battery technology, so individuals can enjoy safe and cheap energy storage - as well as strengthening and building up our grid. We need to invest into making safer, more performant EVs and we definitely need to invest heavily in public transit. We need to improve our agricultural system and look at our water (mis)use in a general sense, immediately.
I don’t see how we wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Our major companies aren’t focusing especially hard on solving any of the issues humanity faces - unless one believes AI will solve everything for us magically.
The goal of capitalism should be to create competition to generate general maximum efficiency. Once that is reached and natural monopolies start to form, they should be socialized into non-profit utilities.
When the only goal left is enshittification and profiteering, it’s time to gobble them up.
We don’t have to have a race to the bottom, we can get the government to freeze things at the peak and keep them there.
We just need a mechanism to break that up again if it stagnates.
You can do that under socialism as well. The problem with capitalism isn’t the competition to generate maximum efficiency, it’s the monopolization of that efficiency for profit rather than actual good. Why should we rely on the private sector to do what is best for society when publicly traded socialist companies can do the same without the dragon hoarding?
Groups generally do not generate the initial idea, don’t execute the initial vision, and are less agile to do so. There should be some incentive for individuals to drive their ideas for a time, and to benefit from that disproportionately, again for a time. Businesses need to go through a few stages: startup regulation to establish a fair profit window, evaluation of an ongoing competitive window, and lastly a review of consolidation and convergence and conversion to a public utility. The idea that some system can be setup such that everyone benefits all the time from some individual’s IP is pie in the sky, but we can certainly greatly improve the hoarding issue. The absolute most important part of that is to decouple big business ownership and power from an individual back into the government, since that’s where the excess influence ends up anyway.
Socializing them would be a boon sure, but I can’t name a single major monopoly that is at any sort of “peak” that couldn’t be re-implemented better if we started from scratch.
Our country has been stagnating in many areas for decades now and the competition that occurred in the past did not push us to realize “general maximum efficiency” - it pushed us to realize a corporate hellscape, with billionaires drinking our human rights like they would a fine wine.
You don’t start it from scratch, you take away the profit motive by folding it into the political machine as a utility. People still work there, it’s still run in a similar fashion, but you take away the stocks and speculation and decision making and regulate it back to the people either via wages or 100% profit tax rate.
We need high speed rail for freight and transit. We need actual chip/etc. manufacturing in the US, especially for individuals and (non-monopoly scale) commercial applications. We need facilities to process various materials e.g. rare earths and we need to focus on extracting these resources ourselves without slavery or child slavery, or raping the earth. We need to manufacture our own consumer goods sustainably, instead of exploiting people in other countries. We need to invest into battery technology, so individuals can enjoy safe and cheap energy storage - as well as strengthening and building up our grid. We need to invest into making safer, more performant EVs and we definitely need to invest heavily in public transit. We need to improve our agricultural system and look at our water (mis)use in a general sense, immediately.
I don’t see how we wouldn’t have to start from scratch. Our major companies aren’t focusing especially hard on solving any of the issues humanity faces - unless one believes AI will solve everything for us magically.