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.
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.
Thanks for your perspective.
Honestly, I think that all that stock trading stuff make more harm than good. Looks like the whole idea of share as a simple way for ordinary man to invest and potentially profit from that investment, receiving dividends from the profit of company, is completely lost and now all that continous stock trading is just a kind of gambling to make the rich richier. Ordinary man even have no right to buy shares on stock now by himself.
As for patents, I even have few, but really I don't bother to patent things I develop periodically. For the reason you mention. Even if some company will use my invention described in patent, I have no enough money and resources to effectively sue it. I think opensource idea is much better for such things. I share my invention with community and as a payment from community I receive a right to use inventions of other people for my profit.
You're 100% right, the whole stock market is just one giant rigged casino. It is so far from the idea of fractional ownership in profits of a company and providing a mechanism for raising capital that I doubt 1 in 100 "investors" could even write this very sentence.
And I very much like your sentiments regarding patents. We have so little regard for sharing as a virtue in Western cultures. I recall hearing about cultures (from the South Pacific, I think) where sharing was most highly regarded. The most highly respected people were the poorest, because they would use all their resources to throw lavish feasts for the community. What a world it would be were that to go global, huh?