Is anyone else just fed up with companies being greedy?

The only real option is to take advantage of a collapse and make broad and sweeping changes in that moment.

Historically, these kinds of plans have not worked well (see: Franco-Prussian war, Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, Spanish Civil War and Franco, Argentina and Juan Perón...) A power vacuum is generally a risky thing, and without a proper plan and organisation, a fascist regime taking over is extremely likely.

The alternative must be well established by the time the curtains fall. Otherwise it will be a survival of the fittest, and those most eager to use elbow tactics to gain power.

Don't wait for the revolution. Provide alternatives to fascism and the status quo today. Organize, bring communities to work with each other and subvert capitalism. It's the only remotely peaceful way. Even then, there will still be blood, and lots of it.

I'm a fan of a (slightly niche) economic theory called Distributism. It has roots in the Catholic church and was championed by authors G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. I wish it would pick up more steam in secular cicrcles.

I think the best way to think about it broadly is to say "wide as possible ownership". A distributist society would favor the cooperative over the corporation. It would encourage worker-owned businesses. It might welcome the return of guilds. There's more to it, but I don't want to do it disservice by watering it down.

It's hard to switch economic paradigms on a dime, and that switch can often go awry. One neat thing about distributist thought is that it can be bootstrapped within the post-capitalist environment. A co-op is capable of out-competing a corporation in the same market.

Economic collapse is horrific at an individual level.

Economic collapse was also what drove Hitler to power, and encouraged the entire country to follow him into a global war.

In fact, there are credible arguments that it wasn't the New Deal that brought America out of the recession, but the investments in people and infrastructure made during world war 2.

Currently in the US, conservatives are engineering such a hatred towards anything liberal, I just don't see anything good coming out of a great depression. It seems like it will only make the divisions worse.

And as Piketty argued, you need a progressive tax rate to fix inequality and temper greed with social care. But since Raegan, American conservatives have been trained to despise the idea of taxes on the rich or support for the poor.

It's possible there could be a liberal resurgence, or perhaps actual fiscal conservatives could regain control of the republican party, but with the gerrymandering the way it is, the supreme court weighing in on all things political, and the fact that the next recession looks likely to occur under Biden's watch, I am not optimistic at all.

I’ve always taken a stance that the benefits we attribute historically to capitalism are really the benefits of competition, and we should be striving to maximize the quantity and quality of competition. The “free market” is a wonderful invention but the concept has been corrupted in our era to be equivalent to an unregulated market. Instead, I see capitalism like nuclear energy: properly regulated and there’s wonderful benefits to all, left to run unregulated it will eventually blow its lid off and turn everything in the vicinity into a wasteland.

Pro-competition:

• Too big to fail is too big to exist, creative destruction is a prescribed burn that clears the forest for new growth. A pro-competition stance says that companies should be regulated to be small enough that the failure of any one is at most painful but not catastrophic.
• Income inequality transforms markets from democracies into autocracies. “Rising tides” arguments are bullshit; relative wealth disparity disenfranchises the common person. A pro-competition stance works towards an equal enough wealth distribution that the allocative power of markets is democratic.
• Non-living wages are a trap—if your economic activity demands a person make a Hobson’s choice between a crushing job or risk starvation and death, then you’re barely better than slavery. A pro-competition stance generates a social safety net that fundamentally gives people an alternative to taking jobs that otherwise do not compensate adequately for their downsides.
• Regulatory capture lets companies dig a moat around themselves and pull up the drawbridge. Convenient that OpenAI launches a massive AI regulatory lobbying effort months after launching the most successful AI project in recent memory, right? That’s not to say that all regulations are inherently bad—many were written in blood—but we tend to see the immediate negative outcomes being restricted without seeing the long term incentives that have changed. A pro-competition stance regularly evaluates the ongoing costs of regulation against their benefits and how that balance plays out over time.

I don’t know if there’s an official term for this political philosophy; it doesn’t seem to strictly fall into one party or another.

It sounds like your position is close to Matt Stoller: capitalism spurs innovation but we need regulation to stop monopolies, the way the trust busters did 110 years ago.

My position used to be closer to Matt Bruenig: monopolies are no worse than any kind of capitalism and heavy regulation is needed regardless of how the market has shaped itself.

But these days I'm noticing how many of the problems in the OP are America-specific, and I'm feeling kind of fatalistic about it. The whole world has sent its weirdos to America for two centuries. And now the result of that is that Europe is full of conformists happily working their way towards a climate change regime of heavy regulation, whereas the United States cannot pass or execute any form of nationwide legislation anymore and we are getting increasingly angry at each other about it. It feels increasingly futile to me to try to imagine an ideal regulation regime when we have a national legislature and justice system which is designed to prevent it.

I'm a big fan of the mixed economy—neither completely hands-off free-market capitalism, nor complete governmental control—where effective regulation spurs innovation and prevents the Durkheimian regulation extremes of anomie (normlessness, unbridled capitalist activity) or totalitarianism.

I read a really good book on this topic a few years ago, American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper (2016) by economics professors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson. They highlight the way that completely free-market capitalism tends to ignore (or in some cases worsen) externalities, and highlight the need for effective regulation, even quoting from Adam Smith on the subject. If you'll forgive a lengthy quote from the book's introduction:

Markets give rise to highly resourceful economic actors who want government to favor them. Absent measures to blunt or offset their political edge, their demands will drown out the voice of broader groups: consumers, workers, concerned citizens. Today the message most commentators take from Adam Smith is that government should get out of the way. But that was not Smith's message. He was enthusiastic about government regulation so long as it wasn't simply a ruse to advantage one set of commercial interests over another. When "regulation . . . is in favor of the workmen," he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, "it is always just and equitable." He was equally enthusiastic about the taxes needed to fund effective governance. "Every tax," he wrote, "is to the person who pays it a badge, not of slavery but of liberty." Contemporary libertarians who invoke Smith before decrying labor laws or comparing taxation to theft seem to have skipped these passages.

Far from a tribune of unregulated markets, Smith was a celebrant of effective governance. His biggest concern about the state wasn't that it would be overbearing but that it would be overly beholden to narrow private interests. His greatest ire was reserved not for public officials but for powerful merchants who combined to rig public policies and repress private wages. These "tribes of monopoly" he compared with an "overgrown standing army" that had "become formidable to the government, and upon many occasions intimidate the legislature." Too often, Smith maintained, concentrated economic power skewed the crafting of government policy. "Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and workmen,' he complained, 'its counsellors are always the masters. . . . They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people."

In the more than two centuries since Smith wrote, the world's advanced economies have grown vastly more complex and interdependent, creating many new sources of market failure. Moreover, the extraordinary scale of modern capitalism has repeatedly fostered the sharp concentrations of economic power that so worried Smith. What Smith saw in the protodemocracies of his day—concentrated interests converting power into profits—has become only more sophisticated and common in the advanced democracies of our day. Smith's intellectual heirs even have a term for such politically generated reward. They call them 'rents,' and efforts to secure them "rent seeking."

Contemporary economists sometimes write off rent seeking as if it's only a problem when government is active. […] But as Smith clearly recognized, the intermingling of markets and politics is inevitable: A private sector completely free of government influence is just as mythical (and undesirable) as a government completely free of private-sector influence. And a government that doesn't act in the face of distorted markets is imposing costs just as real as those imposed when a government acts in favor of narrow claimants. Crippling active government to reduce rent seeking is a cure far worse than the disease.

And more to the point of corporate greed and governance:

Because of its powers of coercion and coordination, government can produce public goods and encourage the production of goods with positive externalities. Government can also restrict activities that produce negative externalities. Dumping carbon in the atmosphere has been costless to private actors; put a price on it (with a tax or government action), and we will all pay more attention to the true costs of our choices. Government can provide nudges of varying strength that combat the dangers associated with our own myopia, and it can work to prevent the predictable efforts of companies to exploit our own shortcomings for private profit.

Government does not always work well—indeed, we wrote this book because it is working less and less well. And when well regulated, markets often work very well indeed. But there is no recipe for prosperity that does not involve extensive reliance on effective political authority. The conservative vision of shrinking government to a size that will make it "safe" from cronyism is the economic equivalent of bloodletting. The cure is far worse than the disease. Prosperous societies need […] not less government (or necessarily more government) but effective government.

What I don't like is that we're now ratcheting up interest rates in order to offset 'inflation' that's actually just massive additional profit taking.

Last I'd looked, the majority of inflation we've experienced in the last two years has just been jacked up profit margins.

In response, by raising interest rates as much as they have, it's going to massively increase the cost of the debt everyone is on the hook for over time. It's nuts. Yet we have a news cycle that simultaneously is talking about 'constant inflation' followed by a story about record quarterly profits for the fifth quarter in a row.

Tie the two stories together at least.

But a report from the Kansas City Fed found that nearly 60% of inflation in 2021 was because of corporate profits.

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177180972/economists-are-reconsidering-how-much-corporate-profits-drive-inflation#:~:text=Transcript-,In%20the%20past%2C%20corporate%20profit%20growth%20accounted%20for%20maybe%20a,was%20because%20of%20corporate%20profits.

Speaking of Doctorow, everyone should read https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_Printcrime.html

Yes, this is an excellent encapsulation of something I feel like we've all been noticing. Doctorow summarized it, why it happens, and gave it a name. There's power in that.

During the most recent Reddit drama I’ve noticed a lot of people bring up Twitter and Discord. I’m familiar with Twitter drama but I must have missed what happened at Discord. Can you give me a TL;DR?

The profit maximization obligation is a myth used to defend the indefensible. Companies are obliged to act in their shareholders' best interests. Sometimes that is about showing a profit, but it's hard to argue that working to extract every bit of value from large swaths of the world is something that is actually in shareholders' best interests. Especially given that mutual funds are major shareholders, and the people who invest in them aren't the ultra-wealthy, but the middle class that's currently being squeezed.

I think a big thing as well on the greedy behaviors is that, because of the free-for-all that is our deregulated markets, an individual company that is fair and honest goes against a hostile tide. Such a company will inevitably become overtaken by companies that do whatever they can think of to increase profits and minimize costs, given that they don't completely disenfranchise their workers from being productive, and given enough time for the two companies to compete on the market. The company that cozies up to the local politicians in exchange for favors, for instance, gets a massive advantage compared to a direct competitor of similar size that "does everything right". The greediest get rewarded most because the not only is the system designed to reward it, but those who succeed eventually find themselves in the position to tweak the system even more in their favor through lobbying, propaganda campaigns, and straight-up ignoring laws if the fine for getting caught is less than the profit generated by it.

I agree that many of the issues stem from the pure profit focused view of publicly listed companies - they need to grow and grow to maximise share price at the expense of everything else.

What about private companies though? It seems that many companies start off as small, ethical, customer and employee focused, but will inevitably become the beast that they originally opposed. Is it unreasonable to hope that a privately owned company can remain ethical as it grows?

Does this inflation adjustment take into account the basket of goods that low wage earners are spending their money on?

Yea I think the whole price increases == corporate greed thing is overdone.

However, I do worry about inelastic good manufacturing and signals allowing companies to effectively collaborate on pricing. That seems possible to have occurred.

Tangentially related, but look at rental markets. In Canada, rent has risen seemingly in lockstep with rate increases. (Although admittedly I haven’t researched that fact extensively and if there could be other causes). Economics would suggest that rent is already what the market will bear, but clearly a clear signal is all that is required for landlords to cooperate.

I do think that this completely ignores the fact that it's the elites (for lack of a better term) who own corporations who are buying off the politicians. It's the very group of elites who own the corporations that have drowned us in decades of anti-government, pro-corporate propaganda.

They've systematically attacked education and spewed propaganda to remove from the public the very tools that you're saying the public should use to hold them accountable.