But the first brands fraud and bankruptcy fiasco has reminded me of something that I thought of years ago and did not get around to writing. Basically, capitalism is suicidal.
If truckers are allowed to drive on the roads without weighing their vehicles they will tear up the roads with excessive overweighted trucks. The Fourth Power Law states that the damage done to a road surface is the fourth power of the weight on each axle. This means that a few hundred extra pounds on a semi truck axle does far more damage than the equivalent amount of weight on a passenger vehicle. If trucks are allowed to drive with too much weight they destroy the road surface and therefore it destroy the very infrastructure their business model depends on. Lots of truckers and trucking companies are constantly trying to weasel out of using weigh stations and drive surreptitiously to evade the law. They even have software like Drivewyze to game the system. This is obviously incredibly foolish. People often say that Roman concrete was better than Portland cement but the Romans never had semi trucks on their streets, and the Roman roads that remain are the result of survivorship bias. That point is a tangent though.
If radio stations are not regulated they will talk over each other and ruin their ability to make money. If the USDA does not regulate the meat industry they will poison the beef supply with e coli tainted meat (the way they did in the past) and you would have to go establish a relationship with your local rancher.
Without regulation there would be far more lethal drugs on the market, and this would totally undermine the ability of the industry to market its products. Consumer products would have more heavy metals and other pollutants in them without regulations. Go to any Chinese market and you will find that many of the products sold have California Proposition 65 labels on them. A lot of the food supply in China is contaminated with chemicals. A lot of foreign countries including Russia and China have soil contaminated with long-lived pollutants and pesticides.
The point I'm making with all of this is that capitalism wants to destroy itself. Capitalism is actually kept in line by countless regulations. It is constantly forced to behave in a rational way and to the degree that it behaves irrationally it is either because (a) it managed to plug into the legislative process and corrupt the legislation that regulates it, or (b) it has innovated its own self destruction too quickly for the law to keep up, or (c) the current crop of lawmakers is not a particularly competent at keeping it on the straight and narrow. Capitalism is like some brilliant test pilot whose drunk most of the time. You clean him up, make him detox, and put him in the cockpit. He's a swashbuckler or brilliant rain man but as soon as the structure is taken away he crashes out and his wife leaves him. Capitalism wants to die, or at least it does not want to produce anything of value. It wants to turn consumers into addicts, it wants to force you to buy its products, it wants to deny you the right to repair, it wants to run Ponzi schemes, crypto scams, and do corporate raiding. Honestly it would be better if all the businesses were like consumer owned or worker owned co-ops with the capitalist element reduced to nothing but financial speculation and price discovery. You could divide an economy into seven basic parts each with its own business model and greatly improve things.
1. Family owned production businesses (not allowed to engage in mergers or sell the business, passed down from father to son. If the children don't want to run it then it is transferred to a group of competent tradesmen who are already it's managers. This would be the farming sector, trucking sector, home builders, aircraft manufacturers, logistics, freight, overseas shipping, tool manufacturers, auto companies, parts companies. Also roofing companies, plumbers, and electricians.
2. Worker owned retail and service businesses. This would include all chain restaurants, all supermarkets, and any other retail business with a wide economic footprint. It would not necessarily include bars or coffee shops which would be mostly sole proprietorships. It would include physical infrastructure like cable companies, garbage disposal, electric companies, and general manufacturers. It works like a regular corporate hierarchy but with worker vestment in the company stock. These are not workplace democracies.
3. Customer owned administrative businesses. This would include all banks—which would be credit unions, package delivery companies, Amazon, all dating websites, social media companies, and news businesses. It would also include hospitals and clinics which you would become a member-owner of to get your health care. Each of these businesses will be structured where the consumers review the actions of management and vote to kick out underperforming executives. Executives get their jobs through promotion and lose them through a kind of negative election.
4. Government-owned heavy industry. This would be your steel plants, nuclear power, solar power, oil companies, basically the entire energy sector, mining companies, defense contractors, and anything critical to national security.
5. Partner owned law firms, vet clinics and accountancies.
6. Privately owned businesses. Chinese restaurants, bars, gaming stores, record stores, coffee shops. Basically all the little retail stuff.
7. Pure capitalism. Since nearly everything in the entire economy is worker owned, customer owned, family business, or government owned the capitalist sector is used for financial occupation of foreign countries. The stock market is basically a bunch of corporations owned by Americans that sell to foreigners. The law requires that all domestic companies follow this five categorization system. Therefore the capitalist system is used as a tool of foreign conquest by financial occupation. This also means that private equity rating of domestic companies is illegal, but not of foreign ones. Pure capitalism is also allowed to sell the domestic bonds of corporations. Domestic companies might also be allowed to issue shares and sell them on the stock market but these shares have no voting power. Only companies whose customers are entirely in foreign countries can issue voting shares, and those voting shares can only be owned by Americans.
Logic:
The two greatest dangers in the production industry are corporate raiders and collectivization. Collectivized farms have always been a disaster, that is why they don't sit in the worker owned category. These businesses are best run as family businesses because that keeps the skills they rely on among people who know how the trade works. This structure preserves skill and is proven highly effective.
Supermarkets work great as worker-owned businesses (just so long as they aren't allowed to practice workplace democracy). There are a couple of worker owned supermarkets near me and they always have low prices compared to the other corporations. Supermarkets need to be insulated from price hiking shenanigans and shrinkflation and this is most effectively done by making the people who work there it's owners, since they have an incentive to keep the prices down and the quality up, since they are also consumers of their own products. Jet engine manufacturers and engineering companies also work great as worker-owned. The purpose here is to preserve skills, maintain quality, prevent private equity raiding, and inhibit inflation.
The greatest danger with social media companies and media companies in general are offending the consumer. The company must be aligned with the needs of the consumer otherwise they will develop toxic algorithms. Customer ownership solves all the problems associated with Disney-style left-wing activism destroying the quality of media. Dating apps are designed to sabotage healthy relationships but with customers looking over the shoulder of management every algorithm would be scrutinized by the users of the platform. Customer owned administrative businesses should be structured as a democracy by review, where all the actions of management are reviewed by a cabal of its customers and toxic or sociopathic managers fired by vote. For customer ownership to work a large enough percentage of the customers must be involved in the voting process to prevent activists from dominating the process. This is done by literally turning the app off until you review management actions and vote to fire people.
Government-owned heavy industry. The reason for this is obvious. You can't allow your critical industries to be bought up by foreigners or driven out of business by cheap commodities like subsidized steel from China. Government can run critical industries at a deficit if it comes down to it.
Partner owned businesses and privately owned businesses are pretty much the way law firms and restaurants already work. No reason to change a good thing. Forcing them to stay in their category prevents them from being mopped up by private equity.
Lastly, pure capitalism. Since capitalism is basically a hostile force it should be used as a tool of conquest. Sequestering all domestic industries in these various worker owned and consumer owned structures inhibits outside control and aligns them with their correct incentives. This looks like a radically different type of economy, not socialist but not capitalist either. Domestic companies are allowed to issue non-voting shares only. This is just so they can raise funds. Sure go ahead and gamble with the stock. Let the price discovery mechanism tell you if companies are in trouble. But owning voting rights is only for foreign conquest.
A great side effect of all of this is that by inhibiting the financial power of billionaires there is really nothing to give money to Congress, no financial force from the domestic economy inhibiting rational policy. The only place to make money as a billionaire is through foreign financial conquest, and thus, billionaires become economic generals for the control of foreign nations by US interests.
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