Squeezing people is an easier source of investment gains. In theory, competition keeps this in check, but competition is for the little guy. If you listen to business pitches or investor relations or take business classes you know the real game is all about avoiding fair competition by hook or by crook, and the biggest companies are the ones who have done this successfully. Two-sided markets, network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, etc, etc, and yes, at the bottom of the the list of anticompetitive forces we have the runt red-headed stepchild of regulatory capture, which is real, but tends to be overstated by people who want blanket deregulation and reverse-engineer their complaints to get what they want.
> Are there other non-market forces which created this equilibrium?
Haha, and here we see the reverse-engineering process in action. Capitalism is never responsible for its own messes! Every mess MUST have come from a market distortion! Deregulation is always the answer!
Welch exploited a combination of events when a lot of those limitations (especially legal) ended, acting in extremely capitalist ways.
Is that what you perceive the mainstream dogma to be? When I observe use of the word "capitalism", it is usually in regards to rationalizations for interventions or other socialist policies. Whereas proponents generally use specific language, like market, market-based or laissez-faire. Opponents are can be observed using language like, neoliberal, deregulation, greed and capitalism.
The Sad Decline Of The Word "Capitalism"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrochafuen/2013/05/01/the...
>Although Karl Marx did not create the word, it was after his work “Das Kapital” (1867) when the term “capitalism” began to be widely used to describe an economic system based on private property as the means of production. Marx remains the great labeler: “capital,” “the capitalist” and “the capitalist system of production” appear repeatedly in his writings.
...
>Should we care if we lose the term capitalism? Assessing its popularity, or lack thereof, I recently reviewed the mission of 25 leading market oriented think tanks around the globe. I could not find a single one using the term. “Free enterprise,” “free-markets” “free-economy” and better yet “free society” will continue to crowd out “capitalism,” if not as a system, at least as a word.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Looking over HN comments, I observe that uses of the term generally contain anti-market critiques.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=capitalism
Popular stories also seem to use it in a generally negative way, or with a modifier to "improve" it.
I'm not convinced that the mainstream dogma is positive. To the contrary, I would regard use of the word as symptomatic of anti-market sentiment.
Personally (as I am not any kind of educated expert nor an oracle) I would say that a lot of "free enterprise", "free economy", "free society", even "market-based" terms are very much orthogonal to capitalism and behaviours described by it, but some of them push for conditions that enable said behaviours (deregulation - which I often encounter as positive term thrown around - or "laissez-faire". Or even absolute focus on "free" in "free market" to detriment of said market as bigger players destroy competition)
If we accept the premise that Welch sold the goose that laid the golden egg for short-term "number go up" and immediate shareholder satisfaction, another question arises. Are there other non-market forces (such as easy money policies from the central bank, or an unfriendly domestic regulatory environment) which created this equilibrium? If so, then laying blame at the feet of "capitalist greed" or the trope of monocled Monopoly men in stovepipe hats, may be misplaced.
That said, I'm not sure that, "Jack Welch, the Man Who Optimized For the Corporatist Mixed-Economy" would resonate as well with audiences.