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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • How does an oligarchy come into existence in a capitalist democracy that didn’t start with a monarchy? Can you see a relationship between the process of consolidation and the creation of this oligarchy, where the oligarchs are the people who accumulated wealth through this process, gradually using this wealth to capture the regulators, leading to more consolidation, more wealth and greater capture, and repeat? We didn’t wake up one day with an oligarchy that wasn’t there yesterday. It’s not like all of the current oligarchs can be traced back to an oligarchic family from the past.









  • Businesses need to fail because otherwise the wrong people end up leading.

    When businesses fail, their competitors buy their assets, employees, customer bases, and get bigger. Keep playing that a few more rounds and you get a monopoly that can and will prevent or buy new entrants. Then anyone including the wrong people in the industry enter this one company because that’s the only company in this industry.

    This isn’t an argument against letting businesses fail. It’s an argument to show that the game of competition doesn’t produce stable competitive environment in the long run. Instead it’s a temporary stage that some markets exist in on the way to consolidation. You can find countless examples for this around us. And therefore letting businesses fail through competition isn’t a long term solution to these problems.


  • Having grown up in a ex-Eastern bloc country that went through the US-developed economic shock therapy, while things are better now than in the 90s, people refer to the economic plundering, mass unemployment, personal destitution, hyperinflation, and the accompanying crime that occurred as “the democracy.” The democracy refers to the process of speedrunning the path to capitalist oligarchy, a completely captured political process which serves that oligarchy, resulting in record low voter turnouts of low 30s. So yeah, you got that right.