Amazon.com used a series of illegal strategies to boost profits at its online retail empire, including an algorithm that pushed up prices U.S. households paid by more than $1 billion, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission detailed in a new court filing on Thursday.
Why? Isn’t this just capitalism? They’re just using algorithms to squeeze us further.
Well, as you’ve likely noticed, capitalism only works a theoretical construct. It makes the assumption of an ‘ideal’ market, which very much violates the laws of physics. As a result, no country actually employs unregulated capitalism.
Adam Smith wanted regulated capitalism.
Free market capitalism was never his idea. That’s robber barons like Jeff that promoted that shit and came up with the idea.
i don’t think it works even in a theoretical context. like you said, it requires assumptions that violate the laws of physics. i don’t think that’s a great starting place for any political/economic system.
Well, I did write construct, not context. So, yeah, I do mean that you need to make up a fundamentally different reality (where everything happens in a singularity) for it to then potentially work as the theories say.
And while we can have arguments on whether those theories with fundamentally wrong axioms can still be mapped to reality, monopolization is a very obvious example where it falls apart and we do need regulation from the outside.
oh i misread that the first time. yeah i completely agree. i was even thinking of saying the thing about monopolies in my comment, i think it’s a pretty good example of how things start to fall apart.
making up fundamentally different realities does sound like fun though, just not for the purposes of trying to justify capitalism.
Depends on your definition of “capitalism”.
This is not supposed to happen in a market economy, as you have in developed countries. Many people define “capitalism” as being, more or less, that system.
A narrower definition of “capitalism” is private control of the means of production. In that sense, “capitalism” is at odds with a market economy, which is one reason why that private control is limited in many ways in developed countries.
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Sadly this is exactly what capitalism is though, and the government allows them to do worse
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