Have you ever noticed how Cyberpunk tends to frame their corporate fascist worlds as the result of "unrestrained capitalism". I was listening to a discussion on this while I was working and I wrote this in response. Let me know your thoughts below.

I really hate the framing that these types of stories do around "Capitalism". It seems to me that a sort of corporate feudalistic society is what many people believe and treat capitalism to be these days, though that is really more closely resembled to fascism. A society wherein the corporations are able to make the rules, control the people, and industry is determined by who has the most connections and not who is leading the competition.

For example, YouTube is the premier video hosting website, but it also holds that position largely because they have been allowed to operate at a continuous loss for over a decade due to Google's subsidization of their product. Because of this, no competitor could ever hope to compete with YouTube in terms of scalability or attracting creators as they simply cannot afford to offer the same profitability that YouTube can offer to content creators, aka producers. YouTube also picks and chooses what content to promote and what content to ignore within its algorithms. This means that people do not actually find the products they want, but they find the products that YouTube thinks that they want. In this way, I would never consider YouTube to be a capitalistic entity. Within it's own platform, its algorithm ensures that competition favors those who act within favor of its preferred overarching desired outcomes, and, in terms of competition as a product, YouTube is subsidized to have what could be considered an "unfair" advantage over the competition.

Here's the thing, if capitalism, meaning the free market, which is, at its most simplified, the ability to choose who to do business with and the ability to produce what you choose to produce, how do you stop businesses from choosing to work together and create advantages for themselves, their partners, or their subsidiaries, that gives them an advantage that is impossible for any other competitor to get? I'm not entirely sure if such a thing would be possible without entirely eliminating the ability for businesses to engage in business to business free market engagement. The freedom of one aspect (business to business vs business to consumer) to engage in free market activity seems to either demand or preclude the ability of the other market from being able to engage in a largely free market environment.

On another note, Reagan was a GARBAGE capitalist...by the definition I use. The Free Trade Agreement era that Reagan initiated completely sold out the working classes of Americans. If any society opens up their ability to engage economically with other nations, supply and demand tells us that the increased supply of labor, especially labor from a less prosperous nation and therefore one that demands less value for their work, will either lower the equilibrium price of that labor or cause jobs to be outsourced to the cheaper nation while the labor value in the prosperous nation stagnates. It is ECON 101 level stuff. And to do this while following an inflationary monetary policy and running up debt that will fall on the shoulders of future generations is an outright crime against the people of your nation! Why is our generation so nihilistic? Because these policies have destroyed our ability to live the american dream which actually was very possible... for about 20 years. The American Dream also did exist pre 1912, as we had a deflationary currency back then, so generational wealth was possible to grow even among the poorest of people. The switch to inflation has forced our country and every one that has followed suit into an endless game of losing wealth for ever more temporary things. This is why digital products are all now subscription based. Because subscriptions for mass content is a way for people to still be able to engage with things they enjoy that they otherwise wouldn't be able to afford. It's a socialistic redistribution of consumer costs onto those who buy in and consume the least to provide excess value to those who consume the most. It's the most effective redistribution of wealth society has ever developed while also a way to mask the fact that people can't actually afford to buy things. That is also why phone companies offer buy-back programs and zero downpayment financing. Most people can't afford to own an iphone, but they can afford to pay for a part of it and then sell it back after 2 years to cover some of the cost that they couldn't originally afford.

A key tenant of free market is the choice of what to produce, not just the choice of consumption. This dystopian path we see ourselves on is caused by the overemphasis of our society on the consumption aspect of capitalism while ignoring the choice of production. Choice of production has been all but removed, and, despite ever growing choices in what to consume, the ability to find those alternatives is regularly diminished among any product that can be considered commercialized or corporatized. The big players have access to the liquid capital (again, largely due to our monetary policy that allows the near infinite printing of money and lending of money that doesn't actually exist) to easily buy out any relevant competition or merge with them in order to grow in scale and drown out any struggling businesses that are attempting to grow their way into the mainstream eye. They are also able to abuse patent laws to develop things in a way and then force competitors to never be able to access those techniques, tools, or products without going through them. Essentially, we've designed our system to promote the development and flourishing of Oligopolies, which, by its very nature, it anti-free market.

See, the thing is, free markets don't necessarily require capitalism per se. They just require the ability for people to have choice in how they engage with their society, from an economic perspective, and that the choice is not restrained via corruption, undue influence from biased market controllers, or the inability to make a choice.... Also the currency should probably be deflationary so that the people can always have hope and know that the fruits of their labor will be able to carry forward into the future. Cause, right now, I need to earn $22 for every $20 I would've earned back in April cause our inflation in May was literally 5%. Thanks for the 5% pay cut in one month DC