If whatever actions turn a non government entity into something inefficient, then the entity wont survive for long and will go out of business (or at least that's the hope of a competitive free market economy)

> then the entity wont survive for long and will go out of business (or at least that's the hope of a competitive free market economy)

Only if the inefficiency is large enough to overcome other forces.

Or to put it another way, picture if every single individual teams at Google did this to the tune of 100k a year, per team, and assume among 135,000 employees there are 13500 teams.

That's 1.35 billion dollars. Well under 1% of their revenue.

No way is a competitor going to appear that is identical to Google in every way except they have better budget management. Google has too many moats around their business, they can be really inefficient in many many ways and still dominate in multiple markets.

> competitive free market economy

It was not even believed by Adam Smith. He writes that it only works that way in a controlled environment. That’s why European countries usually rank higher in market freedom than the US, because we don’t have companies getting so cancerously big that they have very real effects on law making (how lobbying is legal is still beyond me)

You need to take another look at how the EU makes laws, and who gets to propose them, and who they talk to.

It's less blatant, but just as pernicious.

The USA got rich because of unbridled capitalism. Then richness trickled down through generations of companies while regulations caught up and their government became a behemoth not dissimilar to the ones living in EU and that the USA was running from.

Nowadays the USA jurisdiction is comparable to the EU one, but they still have more $$$.

If you like freedom rankings I recommend these ones: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking

Did that richness really trickle down? Just look at the distribution of that money.

Of course. I agree with what I think you're getting at, specifically that not nearly enough richness trickled down. However, the poorest Americans today are still significantly better off than they were in most any previous decade or century because a bit of that wealth did trickle down.

In what time period did this "unbridled capitalism" happen?

It's not always the case.

I work at one of those US bank.

The amount of inefficiencies in form of red tape, confusing processes, custom half-baked tools that crash half the time is just mind-boggling. I've spent more than a week now for opening firewall on one ip/port on one host just to test my prototype in dev environment(local machine or docker are not an option due to lack of admin rights ), and it's still in change approval stage. If we weren't this giant too-big-to-fail bank we'd be out of business by now.

Hope is a really interesting way to frame something that has consistently failed to prove true after centuries of theory and decades of targeted policy changes.

Banks get to privatize the profits and socialize the loses often.

you can survive a lot of inefficiency if you are a natural monopoly.

Ann Rand, is that you?