First,
#capitalism came to us with a sensible trade-off.
"Yes, free and unregulated markets may lead to exploitation and ramping inequalities - but as long as we keep a healthy competitive playing field everyone with enough skills and talent will have a chance to compete".
Then a whole generation of MBA graduates was taught that the very thing that kept capitalism fair and prevented it from degenerated into plutocracy (competition) was actually a structural obstacle to be avoided rather than the glue that held together a very unstable economic system.
They weren't told that they should enter a competitive market and make better products that people genuinely wanted.
They were told that competitive markets are for losers, and that the aim of capitalism is to identify a niche, exploit it through all the possible means, acquire competitors, build a monopoly, and turn the stress of competition into the calmness of rent extraction with low added value and low risks of losing anything.
They were told that the very thing that prevented ramping inequality as wealth concentrated in fewer hands (taxation) was an anathema, a political distortion to be avoided by using every single loophole available, while common citizens with way less disposable income kept financing with their taxes the public infrastructure that made it possible for companies to operate in the first place.
At some point, when wealth becomes so concentrated that inequality reaches levels never seen in human history, and 90% of the global wealth is just in the hands of a handful of companies, those giants have to find other ways of growing. Because they promised their investors that they will keep growing forever, no matter what.
At that point, you may see the most ironic twist of events.
The parasitic companies that exploited everything they could to build their monopolies start blaming normal tax-paying citizens for their inability to grow any further.
"Why would you even have RAM in your PC? We've already driven the prices so high that nobody should even want a personal computer anyway. Why do you still use a computer? Why don't you just give us all the RAM in this world, and then pay us a monthly fee to use the computing power that we deliberately made unaffordable for you to use in your own home?"
This is the final step of unregulated capitalism.
The point where it regresses back to
#feudalism - the very economic system it was supposed to supersede.
They promised that there would have been competition. That everybody would have their fair chance. That private property was sacred. That everyone with enough skills and talent could make a startup from their own garage and become a millionaire.
And they lied.
They actually just wanted to become big enough so they could indiscriminately extract rent from the whole world and get away with it.
They liked competition only when it allowed them to get big, and then they pulled the drawbridge.
They don't want you to build your own startup that may compete with them. They don't even want you to own the means to achieve that.
They may say that they hate taxation, but they want you to pay your taxes to them under the form of subscriptions in order to rent products that they made very sure that you were unable to afford or own.
Just like a Medieval peasant who didn't own anything, who had to rent everything from his feudal lord, and who also had to pay arbitrary tax rates back to him - that's how the lord made sure that nobody grew wealthy enough to challenge his power.
www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/openai-ceo-says-its-quite-terrible-for-your-pc-to-have-ram-sam-altman-says-data-centers-offer-better-utilization
