alt Hacker NewsLots of companies do this (Arizona green tea immediately comes to mind), but more importantly, this has no bearing on the discussion of whether or not capitalism is "good" (really, who ascribes morality to any economic system?), because the US is primarily an exercise in regulatory capture.
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_DeadFred_ • last Tuesday at 12:03 AM
Arizona comes to mind because it's the outlier that everyone knows about, the company that bucks the capitalist pressure. Your choice to use it basically proves my point.
Capitalism outside regulatory capture looks like the East India company. You are basically giving me 'no REAL communism has ever been tried'.
Good doesn't mean moral in this case, it means valuable. Capitalism, or whatever the fuck we have right now, doesn't create much real value, but instead it creates a lot of fake value that we just proxy.
And I say "or whatever the fuck" because, as you point out, it's not really capitalism. And maybe it never was - after all, the US Golden Era was when we had the most central planning, the most social services, and the highest taxes.
But everybody right now is exploiting one teensy little flaw of the economy - humans don't live very long. There's no reason to make stuff good for later when you can take a cash advance and get rich now. Everything is always someone else's problem.
I think one fun case study is superstar CEOs. They're so highly desirable, and they work 5 years at a company and "turn it around" before moving onto the next. But if you look at the company after they leave, it's in shambles. And yet, they are the most sought after CEOs. You don't want the Arizona Green Tea guy, no, you want the guy who ran Chipotle into the ground. But hey, at least he increased their stock price for, like, a little bit.