These aren't sports teams, you don't just get together with your buds and see how it plays out over a couple drinks. "Aw dang I really thought we had it but you brought back child labor right at the buzzer there, rough one today."
No, wealthy people are for price collusion because it gives them more power, and they are against unions because they take away some of that power. Some things actually are that simple.
Internet commenters love to group opinions into a camp and then call them hypocritical. (Ex: capitalists love rent market manipulation but hate unions, those hypocrites!)
Of course, that’s not true, most capitalists would not want price fixing - something generally done under centralized planned economies.
Over time I've come to realize that not all people are the same, that there's a distribution of how agreeable / disagreeable people as well as how assertive. And it turns out on parts of that distribution there are people who enjoy not finding situations that benefit them but winning benefit and status from others.
I don't know whether that's "most" people. I'd guess not and that the distribution gets thinner the farther from the average disagreeableness and assertiveness you go. But it's enough people that I no longer discard adversarial values as a potential motive.
It is an emergent property of capitalist systems that people who love market manipulation will outcompete those who don't and thus end up in positions of such power that they effectively determine the characteristics and behavior of the system.
There are lots of people playing the capitalism game who don't want to cheat. But the system rewards cheaters who then use their power to produce the world we are all forced to live in.
That's the thing about crime: it's pretty much everywhere people are. Churches have cooperated with it. But that association doesn't define what churches are, it doesn't define what law enforcement is, it doesn't define any of the other businesses. In any walk of life, in any kind of organization, there can be people who will organize force and influence for private benefit rather than cooperating for the ideals an institution was created for.
Unions are subject to that too? Well no kidding.
Also "dystopian, Hollywood writeresque prose" -- WTF? The comment you're replying to contains a credible model of how market systems become non-competitive. It's useful whether you like market systems or not (if you like them, you can use it to inform improvements). And what's comes out of creative media production is such a wide variety of content that the only thing that's certain is that you can't keep it all under one umbrella, much less one as tattered as the one you just unfolded. But even if we could imagine some representative-middle it sure wouldn't have a lot of dialogue in it resembling the comment you're responding to. The whole thing just smacks of name-calling driven by unreflective associations.
I would strongly challenge this. Capitalism is generally oriented around maximizing profit. Any time you can sell a good for more than its cost of production, you make a profit. Competitors, when not prevented by things like IP laws, can undercut prices within that gap and take your market share, provided they have a similar cost of production. The "profit gap" can be exploited.
Price fixing "fixes" that bug, and is a net positive over the alternative of racing to the bottom. Better yet, you can use price fixing to arbitrarily increase that gap, which is exactly what TFA is about.
This is an incredibly weak and misguided argument. You're saying "Capitalists don't like X when it harms them, therefore they never like X".
Yeah, but they like X when it benefits them...
You can't extrapolate from a single data point to make a generalization about a whole. Especially when there are enormous differences.
Basically we create markets that enable (sometimes force) transactions in which one side has high amounts of leverage, and allow that leverage to increase over time. We don't view this high leverage as a problem. And, instead of fixing the issue of ever-increasing leverage, we instead exhort people to get to a position where they can be exerting it.
It's no wonder many feel like the game is rigged against them.
Unfortunate phrasing? If the system is really rigged, then you don't just feel it is rigged. You discover, understand, realize - know it is rigged against you?
I think it's more accurate to say it boils down to "our sole underlying principle is our own advantage, and the privilege of not even having our advantages challenged or negotiated."
But otherwise, I quite agree.