Yes. The US used to work to prevent and break up monopolies. This allowed some of the optimistic promises of capitalism to work. There was competition that worked to bring prices down and quality up.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed dozens of competing businesses merged to form conglomerates with little more than speed bumps from government to slow them down, presumably to line the pockets of the would be overseers.
We lost the competition that drove innovation. There’s little need to do anything to gain market share when there’s no real competition. Instead these mega corporations focus on efficiency to bring costs down, because they’re answering to shareholders now instead of consumers.
The result is supply chains have become fragile. One supply chain disruption results in a total shut down, because redundancies have been eliminated. When you have competition, you must have redundancies to ensure you can remain competitive. No need for that when you have no competitors.
If something bad came from the Soviet dissolution (besides the extreme decline of living standards in many of those countries) is that it completely killed any left-wing ideals in the west. Unions, welfare and common good were seen as “defeated” ideas, because capitalism had won. People still haven’t recovered from the “capitalism won” mentality, so anything that comes even close to left wing is immediately shut down
Yes. The US used to work to prevent and break up monopolies. This allowed some of the optimistic promises of capitalism to work. There was competition that worked to bring prices down and quality up.
In the past few decades we’ve witnessed dozens of competing businesses merged to form conglomerates with little more than speed bumps from government to slow them down, presumably to line the pockets of the would be overseers.
We lost the competition that drove innovation. There’s little need to do anything to gain market share when there’s no real competition. Instead these mega corporations focus on efficiency to bring costs down, because they’re answering to shareholders now instead of consumers.
The result is supply chains have become fragile. One supply chain disruption results in a total shut down, because redundancies have been eliminated. When you have competition, you must have redundancies to ensure you can remain competitive. No need for that when you have no competitors.
and lets be clear that the us only did this for a while because the unionists and socislists were damn about to do a revolution.
then the capitalist world stopped caring about worker well being after the soviet union went kaput.
If something bad came from the Soviet dissolution (besides the extreme decline of living standards in many of those countries) is that it completely killed any left-wing ideals in the west. Unions, welfare and common good were seen as “defeated” ideas, because capitalism had won. People still haven’t recovered from the “capitalism won” mentality, so anything that comes even close to left wing is immediately shut down