There is laws in place for illegal conspiracy. Just like laws against killing but you can't 100% prevent either. There is little the gov can do at that front.
But my comment was more for how the Free Market doesn't prevent artificially raised prices and being overcharged. The belief is that the free market will lead to better innovation, better prices and more efficient production of products because of the competition in place companies trying to outperform each other to be the dominant product and to take all the money for themselves.
But what about the times when companies choose not to compete against each other and join together to conspire against consumer. Because the overall benefit of artificial raised prices will benefit them in the long run and a win win for all companies involved.
I would certainly LOVE to see white collars go to jail with the same consistency as murderers, but the difference is that desperate people tend to commit murder, and as such are usually desperate in part due to being poor. Companies conspiring to make money isn't actually illegal unless they traipse into the muddy waters of fraud, environmental abuse, unethical workplace practices, etc. Creating a monopoly is technically illegal, and several actions of corporations have questionable legality, but like I was saying in my last post, this is why they lobby politicians to change or issue exceptions to laws. The government COULD do much more to prevent monopolies, they just don't have a motivation to since profit isn't gained from service to the public so much as service to the millionaire-class.
Your statement about the free market is quite accurate, however, and shows one of the big faults of unregulated capitalism. Thankfully, you're in a thread about Communism, a demonized alternative with a different view about how governments should handle the means of production~ At the end of the day, governments are made up of public servants, ideally placed there democratically to represent the will of their supporters. Giving the means of production up to the government means that, all things working as intended, the shareholders are the populous at large. Everyone prospers when the government prospers, anyone can serve the government when they want to see a change, and government staff don't have to answer to corporations because they wouldn't exist. Corporations are largely parasites that stifle innovation and prosperity, since rapid change can be costly and worker prosperity takes away from profit, and removing them as middle men just makes good sense. Anybody can work for the government as a public servant and push for change (or even just vote), but it is much more difficult to be a board member at a company.
My country and its people have been under this “badly abused economic system” for 42 years, I can equate it to whatever I want. People are just people, they wake up every morning, they eat and they sleep all the same. They do the same things when they’re hurt, or when the state takes away their loved ones, or when they hunger, or when they’re forcibly resettled, or coerced, or spied on by their own neighbours, or when they can’t make ends meet. One thing always leads to another, and the consequences of this particular system of governance, as well as the economic setup, are well-known because they were the same wherever and whenever they were tried. Push anyone hard enough and they’ll all do the same thing - anything it takes to survive, including collaborating with people in charge of a “badly abused economic system”. First there are lofty ideas, then there’s resistance, resistance is met with force, then there’s shortages and finally the inevitable collapse, unless you take the China route and introduce a splash of free market into the bitter concoction. It’s always the same, and it will always be the same, it’s just a question of how quickly it deteriorates into chaos.
Hey hey, its time for a fun game I like to call "Can you spot the USA causing suffering to a communist country via the CIA and economics?!" Seriously, this was during the cold war, and while the USSR was a corrupt group of motherflockers, Poland was literally caught between these two powers. Your own links even pretty clearly sum up how the western countries bled Poland dry financially and encouraged regime change while the east was mercilessly putting it down via similar tactics. I'm not a blind tanky, the USSR was amazingly corrupt and totalitarian, but they were only half of the equation.
I don't think any socialist worth their salt would praise the USSR as the best representation of their values, and a certain global superpower has been hell-bent on making sure that any other communist countries get embargoed to oblivion or worse, driven into coups and assassinations until nobody can see straight and huge bodycounts pile up. It's kind of hard to hear all this nonsense about communist murders when the capital of capitalism has done so much bloodshed on its own, and suffers such terrible afflictions compared to countries with more socialist leanings.
In other words... Foxy is full of beans~ He can keep preaching from atop his high horse, but he obviously refuses to face reality in the fear that it might look harshly back at him.
Go do a better job yourself then and run me out of business. You can do that under capitalism, you can’t do that under communism.
Because anyone can come up with the tens of thousands of dollars to start up competition, the hundreds of thousands of dollars to stay in the game over a long period of setup, hiring, and stabilizing, and weather being adversary to established businesses with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of time your wealth. Sounds absolutely legit.
