Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of capitalism after all

Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by metalliqaz on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @11:32AM (#29176600)

Massive wealth consolidation leads to huge piles of capital that are itching to invest in ventures, which leads to entrepreneurs sprouting up to pitch ideas for a piece of the pie. To get the most enthusiastic investments, they don't bother building a productive company but instead pitch dazzling tech startups that operate at a massive loss in order to disrupt and grow to critical user mass, in order to replace a legacy market with a proprietary platform and thus enable indefinite rent-seeking for growth-obsessed investors. The "flywheel" tech companies aren't the point, getting hands on venture capital is the point.

That sounds like good old normal capitalism as I understand it.

Edit: fixed run-on sentence

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by goodpoint on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @11:47AM (#29176851)

Capitalism should be defined by free markets, among other things.

What we are seeing is an unprecedented combination of quasi-monopolies, rent-seeking, and an economy disconnected from real production of goods and services.

It has been called neofeudalism.

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by WitCanStain on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @11:55AM (#29176950)

But all that is the natural and inevitable consequence of capitalism. It's baked into the structure of the system.

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by maedla on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @12:09PM (#29177159)

Exactly. People want to go back to the thing that got us here

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by gwright on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @01:38PM (#29178511)

>rent-seeking,

Unfortunately "capitalism" is a pretty ill-defined term. I wouldn't include "rent-seeking" as a characteristic of "capitalism" but apparently you do.

This makes it very difficult to have coherent discussions. For what it is worth, I think "rent-seeking" is probably a characteristic of all economic systems and therefore isn't something peculiar to "capitalism" and so shouldn't be used as a criticism of "capitalism".

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by goodpoint on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @07:11PM (#29182738)

> I wouldn't include "rent-seeking" as a characteristic of "capitalism"

According to what theory?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking fits squarely into capitalism.

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by gwright on Friday November 12, 2021 @07:52PM (#29206303)

Rent-seeking isn't a phenomena that is unique to capitalism. It is something present in many different (all?) economic systems. So while it is completely fair to be critical of rent-seeking that isn't by itself a criticism of capitalism.

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Re:Uber, DoorDash and similar firms can’t defy the laws of c... by goodpoint on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @12:30PM (#29177424)

Indeed.

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