OK, cool. That definitely helps things.

I think where we’re disagreeing is that I think in a capitalist society the promise of money will inevitably corrupt the government (because it’s made of people). Maybe it can be avoided if the government performs additional regulatory action to stop anyone from getting too wealthy, but that sounds like beyond the limits that you want to set for government.

Without force

Whoah, whoah. Why’d you rule that out?

Your business plan: quality goods at reasonable prices. My business plan: hire some goons to kill you and take your stuff.

Historically, this has a lot of precedence.

In an unfettered marketplace, what stops a dominant player from introducing fetters?

When I read your message, I get the impression that you think of “The Government” as this independent actor. I see it as a system that is primarily controlled by wealthy people. Either directly or through their funding advertisements (including astroturfing/bot-farms) to promote what they want.

So the larger companies do get government assistance… because they are the government. And this isn’t some kind of weird coincidence. It’s fundamental to capitalism’s operation. You can’t have a system that’s based on capital and then have it be unbiased towards entities who have vastly more capital!

Their “real” job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.

Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it’s invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of “he’s not working very hard so he doesn’t deserve the money.”

socialized capitalism

I think I understand your complaint, but I’d say “free market” rather than “capitalism”. But regardless of what we call it, it doesn’t actually exist unless you have a more powerful external system regulating it.

Start with a truly free-market capitalist system. One company manages to temporarily pull ahead (through luck and skill). The rational thing for the company to do isn’t “make better products” (that’s hard) but “destroy competing companies” (much easier). And the end-product would be that the company becomes a government so it can force consumers to pay.

So I’d argue that socialized capitalism (which I’m picturing as a socialist system that permits certain specific free markets and handles the fallout of business failures) is what you actually want.