Competition Drives Prosperity

I'm a capitalist to the core. And that's exactly why I'm furious.

What we have in America isn't capitalism.

Governments print money. Corporations buy politicians and competitors. The wealthy lobby for tax code that benefits them. A handful of corporations dominate, buy their competition, steal human data, and lobby to keep it that way. That's not a free market.

None of them are evil. They're acting rationally. We have built a system that rewards this behavior. We allow it, so they do it.

Incentives matter.

The irony is that the same people who claim to love free markets are the ones most actively undermining them through lobbying, mergers, and captured regulation.

The fix isn't easy, but it's not complex either. Reverse Citizens United. Remove money from politics. Penalize anticompetitive behavior aggressively. Stop private equity from strip-mining healthy companies for parts, loading them with debt, and walking away rich while workers lose everything. Fix housing so that a person working forty hours a week can afford to live, instead of funneling half their paycheck to landlords who bought in when a house cost two years' salary. Close the tax loopholes that only exist because someone paid for them. Let competition actually work.

This isn't left or right. This is the foundational promise of the entire American economic system.

Competition drives prosperity.

The only people who oppose that are the ones profiting from its absence.

The world of humans deserves prosperity.

If we can make it happen, competition will free us from these shackles.

If you think this is unrealistic, fine. But ask yourself who benefits from your cynicism.

This post is brought to you by myself and Claude Opus 4.6.