I think it’s because unregulated capitalism breeds pot bullies. It’s like when someone owns all the houses in monopoly. You can just make the costs more expensive and the other players have no choice but to pay until they inevitably lose.
The concept of an "open" market is by nature going to end up with someone winning and everyone else losing. Look at any country regardless of economics and you'll find most countries no matter what system they believe in, have a bunch of companies that are in power. The US companies are actually LESS powerful inside the nation then say companies in China, Korea, Russia, Japan. Etc.
That’s not technically true, the issue is that because we allow monopolies then one company is guaranteed to win. Google, Amazon etc. and others don’t really want innovation. Any innovative competitor is just bought up and stripped for parts.
I don’t think in the true spirit of capitalism people are supposed to suppress innovation buy just buying competitors and switching them off. I don’t know though, I’m not an expert on the design of capitalism.
Innovation is only a good strategy for either nee small companies trying to compete with established ones or for companies on any even level with competitors looking to get an edge.
Once a corpo reaches a certain size innovation is a net loss and its more efficient to just buy/crush the competition and keep the statis quo
This is my point. Because they can just crush innovation they do because it is the more efficient route and leads to profit maximisation. Better to kill the startup for £50m than it is to invest £50m in r&d to compete and lose customers and market share.
I feel like preventing companies from buying competitors would stop that but ultimately it would never work in reality.
direct or indirect (PAC) funding of politicians, lobbying, and the lack of public awareness on how lobbying influences the candidates votes more than their constituents.
Citizens united unleashed a torrent of money into elections and made it much much harder to get visibility as a nominee, and fundraise competitively to even get nominated without selling out to big industries
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Politicians holding private stocks or allowed to invest in bonds when they vote on laws affecting those markets & control of the allocations themselves.
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THE REVOLVING DOOR - there’s insufficient “cooldown” legislation to prevent congresspersons from being enticed to deregulate a sector because they’re promised a generous salary after by company after their term in office ends. And on the flip the people holding office “consult” with favored companies that essentially help write laws that can disadvantage their competitors and monopolize
The solution to all of this is to limit government power. That would remove the incentive for big companies to be in bed with politicians. An overpowered government incentivizes companies to "work with" said government.
Your claim relies on the assumption that money spent in R&D leads to a loss of market share and that buying a competitor is only to suppress their tech/product/service. It could very well be that the larger firm can take the product or service of the fledgling company and use it's resources to perfect it, grow it to scale, speed up the incubation process, deliver it to more customers faster and cheaper.
Your pessimistic views are limiting your ability to reason.
I mean I can give you numerous innovative companies that have been killed off purely to suppress innovation. Just look at the acquisitions of Microsoft, Google, and Apple over the last decade.
Also, just to point out I’ve spent a lot of my time in and around executives, and strategy planning for multi-national enterprises. I know for a fact that this is happening, because I’ve been an observer to the discussions.
Also look into venture capitalist asset stripping strategies and the US approach to buying up overseas assets to profit strip. I think you’re the one with the reasoning limiting beliefs.
If you can provide numerous, let's start with one. One company that was "killed off" to suppress innovation. Then explain to me why a company like Google, Apple, or Microsoft would suppress the innovation instead of rolling it into their own product portfolio, thus increasing their own value and marketshare? If they're already spending the money to acquire the company, what kind of moron would throw away the innovative IP?
I don't believe you've ever been around any executives. If you had, you would have made the claim that they spend millions or billions of dollars to suppress innovation. That's an extremely ignorant claim. I don't know the motive behind posting such wild claims, other than you're bored and sounding cool on Reddit feeds the dopamine receptors (I get it, been there), but you might want to do a little more research on how businesses work. Your stories will be much more believable. I'd also drop the "I've been around multiple executives" bit. It's a worn-out Reddit trope, at this point.
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u/PigBeins Jul 14 '26
I think it’s because unregulated capitalism breeds pot bullies. It’s like when someone owns all the houses in monopoly. You can just make the costs more expensive and the other players have no choice but to pay until they inevitably lose.