Saw this in my feed.

"Jeff Bezos says people have been ‘incorrectly’ taught that success is a villain: ‘You can be a billionaire if you started a hamburger stand’"

Yes. You can be a billionaire convincing people to work for less than they are worth, and pocket what's left. In any area.

how monopolies actually come to be

Edit: All out*

The police, fire department, education, the roads, literally everything?

If you have a murdered family member you’d have to have murder coverage on your police insurance. If you can’t afford to go to school you can’t go etc.

Are there any here who believe in absolute privatization?

The title. Very self explanatory. Epstein got away with everything using connections and wealth within the capitalist system. Nature of capitalism is for capital to concentrate in the hands of few people who can do whatever they want. So it's just better to keep this system in place at like sacrifice of few thousand children a year?

TL;DR: We're Fucked.

Disclaimer: This post is made with the assistance of AI as English is not my primary language. I just want to share my realizations. If you disagree, that's ok! Please share the reason why so we can discuss.

We need to stop looking at corporate greed as a random glitch and start looking at it as a beautifully, ruthlessly engineered piece of social architecture. The systemic issues we face aren't a failure—they are manifestations of a model designed to leave the average qualified professional with zero counterplays.

The loop works through three deliberate mechanisms:

• The Wage-Shelter Trap: They don't accidentally underpay you. Entry-level professional wages are precisely balanced against crushing local rents to ensure your financial runway is exactly zero days. You can't strike, quit, or protest because you are always one paycheck away from homelessness. Survival costs are being used as a compliance tool.
• The "Cheap Army" Strategy: Companies scream about vacancy crises but refuse to train willing, qualified graduates. Why? Because their financial models calculate that it’s cheaper to treat talent as disposable inventory—paying HR to constantly recruit and burn through a rotating bench of cheap juniors—than it is to pay fair market rates to retain people.
• The Controlled Opposition: You can’t look to centralized governments, bureaucratized unions, or political advocacy groups for top-down salvation. The system has legally and structurally absorbed dissent, turning these institutions into pre-approved safety valves designed to let workers vent steam without ever disrupting corporate capital.

The Long-Term Endgames: What happens next?

The aggressive corporate push into AI and automation isn't about human progress; it's a massive hedge against the global demographic time bomb. This leaves us with two distinct future scenarios:

• Scenario A (If AI Succeeds): The Shift from Asset to Liability. Right now, politicians pretend to worry about overpopulation but fear birth rate decline because the GDP machine needs human bodies to produce and consume. But once AI replaces us, the 99% stop being an economic asset and become pure competition for finite planetary resources (water, energy, land). The elite will suddenly have a massive corporate incentive to trim the population—not through a dramatic robot war, but through boring, bureaucratic neglect. Public health infrastructure will be left to rust, healthcare will be priced out of reach, and systemic barriers will quietly choke out human birth rates.
• Scenario B (If AI Fails): The Stagnant Human Friction Loop. If the AI bubble bursts and corporations remain trapped in their dependency on human labor, the trillions wasted on tech R&D will be socialized. The bill will be sent to us via immediate wage freezes, mass layoffs, and extreme productivity demands. Corporations will continue to run operations at a sloppy, miserable baseline to protect quarterly profits, while the workforce enters a state of mass psychological surrender ("lying flat") until absolute structural breakdown forces a state-level concession.

They have rigged the rules so completely that even when they lose a macro-economic bet, the bill is automatically sent to our mailboxes. We aren't failing the system; the system is operating exactly as it was designed to.

The issue is, and always will be, greed. And the solution relies on the workforce itself collectively refusing to comply—but in a system engineered to starve you out for trying, that requires a miracle.

What people don’t understand is that corporations being treated as citizens is the enemy of capitalism. Corporations are not capitalism incarcerate.
once you get rid of this made up immortal being that

-Cannot be tried for crimes or when they are they are fined less money than they made for doing said crimes
-Cannot be imprisoned
-Cannot be put to death
-Is not actually owned by any one person just investors who don’t actually have a say they just there for the profit.
-Can maintain patents so long nobody has a chance to compete
-Is bailed out of failure due to being “to big to fail” because of the above
And perpetuates minimum wages which always becomes below livable wages.
And never dies

then capitalism can become a viable option.

The small business based on a person is what drives capitalism and like all good things does eventually die to make way for the new generation to have a go.

Tell me why I’m wrong

I read Joseph A. Schumpeter's book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where he spells out his doommer scenario for capitalism. I think he's one of the greatest thinkers ever, and loved reading this book. It was fascinating to unpack his arguments, to see what he gets right, what he gets wrong, and ultimately why capitalism was not as doomed as he thought.

In the West, profit margins are often maximised by the logic of capitalism. Businesses and individuals are encouraged to sell for as much as the market will bear. During a crisis, instead of limiting prices, consumption, or profits so that everyone shares the burden, prices can rise dramatically as market participants try to maximise their returns.

For example, when there is a shortage of housing, rents can keep rising. This does not solve the shortage; instead, it makes the situation even worse for renters, who have to devote more of their income to housing. This reflects a fundamental feature of the Western market system: when demand is high and supply is limited, those with market power can increase their margins at the expense of those with less bargaining power.

China historically operated quite differently. Under the traditional state-controlled commercial system, the government regulated prices and often specified the permitted mark-up, wholesale-retail spread, or profit margin for different goods. Margins were generally relatively low—often around 10% for many ordinary goods—reflecting the principle of 薄利多销 (low profit margin, high turnover). The objective was not simply to extract the maximum possible profit from consumers, but to keep goods affordable while allowing businesses to operate.

So the difference is not merely about competition. It reflects two different approaches to pricing: the Western system tends to let the market push prices and margins upward when demand allows it, whereas the traditional Chinese system placed much greater emphasis on controlled prices, modest margins, and affordability.

It may reflect an interaction between economic systems and cultural values: individualistic cultures can place greater emphasis on maximising individual returns, while more collectivist traditions may place greater weight on keeping prices reasonable and sharing the burden across society.

Western model: higher individual maximisation → potentially higher consumption and margins → greater pressure on resources and inequality.

Traditional Chinese model: lower margins + 薄利多销 + stronger collective considerations → potentially lower consumption pressure and greater social sharing.

In 2022, the UK government under Liz Truss introduced a huge program of tax cuts, particularly for businesses and higher earners, alongside plans for deregulation and supply-side reform. The idea was that lower taxes and less government intervention would stimulate economic growth.

Instead, it caused turmoil in financial markets. The pound plunged against the dollar, collapsing to an all-time low against the US dollar (nearly hitting parity at $1.03). The cost of living soured, and mortgage rates rose. Banks were eventually forced to intervene in the gilt market to halt a catastrophic “doom loop” and prevent further financial instability. To prevent the systematic collapse of the UK economy, banks were forced to launch a £65 billion emergency bond-buying program to artificially stabilize the market.

The long term impact was also that when mortgages returned, interest rates were drastically higher. Millions of UK homeowners faced surging monthly repayments, with average annual mortgage costs projected to spike by up to £5,100 per family.

The government then rapidly reversed nearly all of the tax cuts and deregulations. Truss’s Chancellor was fired, her economic free market program was abandoned, and after just 49 days, Truss resigned as Prime Minister, becoming the shortest serving PM in British history.

So maybe laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t work after all. Cut taxes, reduce government intervention, and you get a collapsing currency, soaring borrowing costs and market prices, financial instability and, eventually, the government having to intervene to save the financial system.

Maybe markets aren’t capable of “regulating themselves“ after all.

Thoughts?