If that was how the world worked then Blizzard would have lost the rights for Diablo to a hand full of wales.

Dumping a ton of money down the toilet doesn't mean you own the toilet.

Most of the development work they gave away free under a public domain like license.

If "capitalism" can't survive reasonable consumer protection then perhaps it deserves to die, sure.

As if those countries had anything reasonable.

Why don't you look to Europe instead?

Russia is literally capitalist though????

This is true. Russia is in fact a good case study of late-stage capitalism. You see, in American capitalism, everyone started equally and then had to build up to their monopoly positions today. In Russia, some people just started out with monopoly positions, due to corruption. So if we want to see what happens due to monopoly positions, we can just look there.

Americans all started equally? You sure, that the early comers, to america, who got huge amounts of land and resources started equally to irish and itallian immigrants?

And even the modern monopolies... Gates and his mom getting him a deal with IBM is a bit different than someone else without a well connected mom.

And looking at tax rates companies like facebook pay, I think corruption is very well alive in USA too.

Started equally, quickly became unequal, but nowhere near as quickly as Russia, which started at maximum inequality.

There is a middle ground.

“As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy.”

Some of the world’s most successful countries are run that way.

It is called social democracy.

I'd like to think there are a wider group of options than a binary choice between "American Late-Stage Capitalism" and "Venezuela"

I'm sorry to have to break it to you but Venezuela and Iran are capitalist countries.

Perhaps when make a similar comment in future you could expand a bit and sketch out a possible alternative to that of people being free to to trade things of value with other people under the aegis of a dynamic regulatory system? I guess you mean a specific meaning of 'capitalism' but the nature of that is not clear at all.

Consider:

Option 1: the definition of "capitalism" requires that zero regulation be applied. In that case, abandon "capitalism" and replace it with whatever you'd call the same model but with regulation.

Option 2: a significant amount of regulation actually is enough alone to fatally destabilize capitalism. I do not believe this to be the case, but if it were, then it should very likely be abandoned, but it's difficult to know how other options might behave in this hypothetical universe.

I would argue that capitalism is exactly what the American system is. These terms are descriptive rather than prescriptive.

That's certainly a model one could use, but it strikes me as not particularly useful.

Claiming lofty ideology is not useful because those policies never exist in real life

Increased precision in base concepts makes it easier to measure and reason about the real-world drift from those bases.

That's assuming that those bases are even the goal for the people implementing the policies, which I am not convinced is the case in the US.

If that is not the assumption then we can just make arbitrary claims about anything and calculate "drift"

I'm looking at this from an economics study view, not a public policy view.

Definitions have an inherently arbitrary component, sure. But stable, precise definitions are far easier to reason with than a shifting definition like "whatever the US is doing right now".

The study of economics is not exactly known for its rigor, I'm not sure how much value that has

Gotta start somewhere.

Do you think capitalism can exist without policy and regulation?

People being free to trade things of value is not capitalism. Many other economic systems allow for this.

Ok, so wanting to stop Google from messing with my system is communism?

That’s not entirely inaccurate.

Capitalism requires that the capitalists (who own for a living) are in control of the state, so it has little incentive to stop Google from messing with your system.

The only certain way to stop them is for workers (who work for a living, the majority of us) gain control of state power through a socialist revolution. Those historically are led by communists or similar.

So if you want control over your computer and ultimately life, join us in conspiring to overthrow capitalism.

The opposite throughout history seems to be the State becomes both the government, and those who “own for a living”. You go from a mixture of corrupt powers to one corrupt, almost absolute power.

I choose neither. Is there another alternative?

That can happen, but it’s debatable how common it has been historically.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that the capitalists also control the media, school curriculums, academia (including economics and history), etc. It’s not hard for them to portray all socialist countries as far worse than they are, in order to discourage workers from rising up. And of course it is in the capitalists interest to do so.

As someone who has lived in this kind of a system in a country that doesn't exist anymore, I'd be (and am) a lot happier in a capitalist system, where workers can choose anytime to create their own budiness without the government owning it.

I'd be even happier if governments treated small businesses the same as they treat large (mostly by making tax avoidance impossible, and making the large pay the same taxes as the small ones to), but that's practically impossible with the corruption in our governments.

Workers need capital to create a business. They can’t gain capital while the majority of the surplus they create through labour is taken by capitalists.

You’re happier in a richer country, as are many of us Eastern Europeans that have been forced to emigrate. We could’ve been even happier in our own countries while having collective control over the means of production, but the (foreign) capitalists made sure that wasn’t possible through propaganda, coups, sanctions and invasions.

Many, many businesses need very little capital to start, less than a price of a car, that most of the people complaining about that, are currently driving.

I haven't moved, I still live in the same city, the country is the one that doesn't exist anymore.

The way I see it is that forms of socialism and communism are true democracies in that when everyone is part of the state we should all have equal say, an equal vote in deciding policy

Depends on who you ask.

Da fuck?

Only 100m?

I would have thought 10x 100m minimum

Google has achieved high economies of scale in many areas but mainly in skirting taxation and government regulation. That's corrupt cronyism, not capitalim. The positive quality of capitalism is it's efficiency, good luck finding that inside bureaucratic google.

It's literally just capitalism lmao

Capitalism requires competition and there is little competition in anything google does. That's in large part due to how heavily "subsidized" they became thanks to governments "overlooking" blatant tax avoidance.

Ooh, that's all I have to do to watch American capitalism die?

Putin has invested much more into owning Russia. According to your logic, we must allow Putin to own Russia.

I mean, for the most part we did.

It was when he wanted to own Ukraine that it rose to the level of significant intervention by the outside world.

Putin has invested significant resources into owning Ukraine, too, so if people have a right to own whatever they invest significant resources into, then Putin has a right to own Ukraine.

Yes, but (continuing the argument) the rest of the world has also invested significant resources into Ukraine to counter his ownership claim (in a way that never really happened while he was solidifying his hold on Russia).

>you will watch American capitalism die.

That's one of my explicit goals, so good.

So, which system do you recommend then?

I'm from a former socialist country (both former socialist, and former country, since neither exist anymore).