Prisoner's dilemma, tragedy of the commons, etc. Local maxima. The best approach for the well-being of everybody is not always the most competitive approach. Your hypothetical co-operative company agrees to not testify and gets screwed over by the company that testifies against it.
Capitalism selects for what works for certain individuals.
We don't know that the success of capitalism isn't just a pyramid scheme that has yet to destroy the biosphere. We only know that on the scale of a few lifetimes, modern capitalism has worked ok-ish for us in the first world. It's been pretty rough on the former colonies and the proxy states.
Capitalism is very new. Mercantilism is just in the rear-view mirror. Capitalism has been subsidized by the simultaneous rise of industrial technology.
There have been flourishings of sudden well-being in the past. The Romans, the Mayans, etc. They discovered new techniques of agriculture, shipping, weapons manufacture, bloomed and expanded and collapsed and died.
Capitalism has not yet matched the long-term success of the Roman republic or the subsequent empire, let alone the Egyptian and Chinese systems of successive dynasties supported by a civil service.
It's a huge mistake to assume that capitalism works better just because we've been doing ok with it for a while and because it's the system embraced by the country that won WWII by being across an ocean. That gave capitalism a big leg up but the headstart is running out.
Kleptocracy has a good chance of out-competing managed capitalism in the next fifty years by using regulatory capture.
If you want to avoid regulatory capture by deregulating, remember that an unfettered market has always degenerated into kratocracy (government by the powerful) and kratocracy tends to turn into aristocracy.
Thinking it and having the ability to single handedly enact it are two very different things.
It’s one thing for me to personally think I’m at the end of history chilling in a coffee shop in SF, it’s quite another when I’ve got the finger on the nuclear codes.
It's less about the annihilation of humanity and more about belief in the superiority of a particular form of Governance.
From Wiki:
> The end of history is a political and philosophical concept that supposes that a particular political, economic, or social system may develop that would constitute the end-point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government.
Capitalism selects for what works for certain individuals.
We don't know that the success of capitalism isn't just a pyramid scheme that has yet to destroy the biosphere. We only know that on the scale of a few lifetimes, modern capitalism has worked ok-ish for us in the first world. It's been pretty rough on the former colonies and the proxy states.
Capitalism is very new. Mercantilism is just in the rear-view mirror. Capitalism has been subsidized by the simultaneous rise of industrial technology.
There have been flourishings of sudden well-being in the past. The Romans, the Mayans, etc. They discovered new techniques of agriculture, shipping, weapons manufacture, bloomed and expanded and collapsed and died.
Capitalism has not yet matched the long-term success of the Roman republic or the subsequent empire, let alone the Egyptian and Chinese systems of successive dynasties supported by a civil service.
It's a huge mistake to assume that capitalism works better just because we've been doing ok with it for a while and because it's the system embraced by the country that won WWII by being across an ocean. That gave capitalism a big leg up but the headstart is running out.
Kleptocracy has a good chance of out-competing managed capitalism in the next fifty years by using regulatory capture.
If you want to avoid regulatory capture by deregulating, remember that an unfettered market has always degenerated into kratocracy (government by the powerful) and kratocracy tends to turn into aristocracy.
Capitalism: Doing OK for now!