Take something like insulin.
If you give a for-profit corporation a monopoly on a life saving drug, they will jack up the prices to maximize their profits.
This is very basic market theory, that every capitalist can understand.
Every capitalist has also learned to repeat that monopolies are bad, and that competition is good.
So, we should be able to agree to get rid of government granted monopolies over drugs, right?
Lol, nope!
Suddenly, the capitalists don’t want capitalism.
Suddenly, they hate the idea of competition, of opening up the market, of removing the rules that keep out competitors.
The sad reality is that while capitalists hide behind ideas of free markets, they only do it when it suits them.
They want “free markets” when it fucks over the little people, not all the time.
They don’t mind pharmaceutical companies getting super wealthy off creating an opioid crisis.
For that kind of stuff, they want deregulation, government staying out of things, letting the pharmaceutical companies enrich themselves with no rules and no intervention.
But when the free market ideas would hurt the big corporations, and help poor people?
When it comes time to fight against government granted monopolies on insulin, on one click buying, or on rectangles with rounded corners?
POOF!
Not a capitalist left in sight.
It’s like when it comes to discussing migrants who want to move to get a better job.
All the free market people who want big government to stay out of people’s lives? Who chant that people who give up freedom for security shall have neither?
Gone!
Nowhere to be found.
Or with all of the “you will own nothing and be happy” stuff, where nobody owns anything anymore, corporations remotely control the stuff that you bought, can take away your media and disable it, can discontinue services and remotely deactivate stuff people bought, or enforce artificial restrictions on a printer so it won’t accept ink from a competitor and all that?
Nope, when it comes to right to repair, when it comes to the holy sanctity of private property, and actually being able to do what you want with the stuff that you bought…
No more capitalists to be found!
Instead they want government to persecute people for hacking and jailbreakingtheir own devices, that they bought.
Being tough on crime, upholding the law, enforcing contracts?
When it suits the wealthy, capitalists LOVE that shit.
But for the little people? Nah. Poor people have to agree to private arbitration to exist, so they get whatever the corporations decide, and have no rights to class action lawsuits or things like that.
That’s why it’s so hard to ever agree on anything: Most capitalists just don’t want things that would reduce the power of the oligarchs, and help the little people, the average Joe.
They bring up ideas of free markets, of competition, of deregulation, only for as long as those benefit the wealthy, and discard those very same ideas immediately when they could be used to benefit the average person.
They want to socialize the costs and privatize the profits, and to kneel before billionaire oligarchs.
They don’t seem to have any other principles than just doing whatever benefits the ruling oligarchs at any time.
Hell, even something as simple as endless wars:
It should be super EASY for capitalists to say “uh, I don’t want my taxes to fund other people’s death”, “government should get out of people’s lives, government is not the answer, it is the problem!”, or “who’s gonna pay for it”, or “we should be more fiscally responsible, we cannot afford it!”, or some other capitalist slogan along those lines.
They could be arguing that there is probably lots of fraud, that lots of the people who receive missiles don’t deserve any, that they should just pull harder on their bootstraps and buy their own missiles if they want some.
But nah.
When it comes to filling the pockets of the military industrial complex, to wasting taxpayer money, and to sending average people to the meatgrinder, suddenly, there isn’t a single one of those anti-big-government free market advocates anywhere.
They are only here when it comes to protecting the interests of the wealthy.
Some poor person is getting screwed? Capitalists chant “life’s unfair, deal with it”.
But if some wealthy person needs to pay taxes? Never a single capitalist around to scream “life’s unfair, deal with it!” at them when they complain.
Really, the modern capitalist should just be called an oligarchist.
They are almost indistinguishable from the right wing royalists that came before.
Apparently all they want is a powerful ruling class that they can kneel before and worship like fanboys.
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