Capitalism in its western form have some restrictions. Some ways of making profit accounted as crime.
- Killing competitor is a crime.
- Theft is a crime.
- Patent infringement is a crime.
- Insider trading is a crime. And so on.
So, capitalism could have restrictions.
What if there could be another capitalism, with another, slightly different set of restrictions?
Say,
- Killing competitor is a crime.
- Theft is a crime.
- Usury is a crime.
- Profiteering (all that stock games) is a crime.
- Intentional limiting of customer in a bought product usage (all that "planned obsolescence", "usage licenses" and "authorized service only") is a crime. with keeping all other freedoms of private business you could find in western capitalism.
Will it still be a capitalism? Do capitalism you defend should have usury and profiteering as essential part of it?
Just asking for a friend who think that western type of capitalism is doomed and sooner or later will be completely demolished by insane elites. So we will have to build new type of capitalism, that have no vulnerabilites that allow creation and existence of elites. :)
What rules and restrictions such capitalism should have to avoid a core possibility of elite formation?
Take in mind, that under "elite" I mean parasitic bastards, like current ones, not a meritocratic elite, like best engineers or best business organizers.
This is not a direct answer to the question, but I have long thought that for just about everything a Leftist points to that is wrong with capitalism, you can trace the effect back to some government intervention. That is to say, almost nothing that we identify as a problem with capitalism is a problem with capitalism.
I also remember a wise man relating to me the saying, "If you have a problem with a capitalist, send another capitalist after him." In the decades since, I have not a single time heard of that being done.
Without government intervention there can't be any restrictions on the ways of making profit, at least without complete rebuild of society. It's a govenment who is enforcing rules of capitalism. All of them, including making theft and murder for profit a crime.
I'm not shure that this unlimited thing without government interference in completely another society could be named capitalism. Moreover, if you could build a society where you don't need any authority to implement members protection from theft and murder, than you just don't need that capitalism at all.
It could work in some libertarian society, where, say, business that hired to enforce society rules allowed to loot the business that did the crime.
Respectfully, and I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, but you may be looking at the issue upside-down. I would suggest that the heart of the idea behind capitalism or the free market or libertarianism or whatever you'd like to call it is that decisions made on how to interact with another another are to be made by individuals for themselves.
The point here is that this is markedly distinct in spirit and practice than a small number of people, even smart and well-intentioned people such as yourself, dreaming up rules for the rest of us to live by then using violence to assure compliance. That's pretty much what we have now and only the rich and powerful like it and wish for more of the same.
Theft and murder, even of small amounts or of unimportant people, are forbidden by natural law, regardless of the economic system and what we name it.
So, is it possible to somehow make that capitalism or free market or libertariarism invulnerable to that way of things?
In any case there is some rules in that capitalism, free market, whatever. I.e. seller and buyer have to agree on the price. Seller can't force buyer to buy. Buyer can't force seller to sell. And so on. You can't describe capitalism, whatever it is, without declaring some rules.
So the question is - is it possible to add or change some rules to make capitalism at least more resistant to what happens with it now?
There is no natural law that prohibit insider trading, f.e. Moreover, patent infringing is accounted as a good by natural law. You know, "don't give a fish to one in need, better teach him fishing". But in modern western capitalism they are crimes. Should they be crimes in that "clean" capitalism you talk, or not?
I'm not much of an expert on these matters, but I'll take my best shot.
Three items on insider trading. First, I recall it being said that companies, counterintuitively, now tend to give out less information about their operations. They fear that any disclosure to anyone in other than formalistic public statements may be seen as "insider" information.
Second, on enforcement, we get "arch-criminal" Martha Stewart strung up over $40K by arch-scumbag James Comey. Meanwhile, you can see price movements before news every single trading day, but no one says a word about it.
Third, water can and will seek it's own level. Companies with an insider trading problem will simply perform less well than investments over time. Dirty players carry away value that does not go to average investors. No way around it, but the market is so distorted there's probably no telling that at this point in time.
As for patent infringement and related "intellectual property" matters, I'm sure you can find any number of analyses showing that these long ago became destructive to the general welfare. And recall that they only exist as a creation of the government.
As a concrete example, someone estimated that a modern smartphone had within it about 250,000 items of "intellectual property". So do the big phone manufacturers license each of these? Of course not. They have amassed huge portfolios of IP, like loaded cannons they point at each other. They compromise by signing "blanket licenses". which are something like truces.
So does "patent infringement" protect the tinkerer in his basement? Maybe. But good luck busting the de facto cartels that "patent infringement" has undeniably created.