@Wrong
Let me readdress this, firstly, employers can still hold out for a better deal much longer than employees can, and secondly:
Letâs say thereâs a market with 10 corporations in a region of the world manufacturing and distributing clothes.
On the one hand, theyâre competing with workers and consumers, trying to pay workers as little as possible and charge consumers as much as possible, on the other hand, theyâre competing with each other, trying to attract as many workers and customers as possible, right?
Seems like things would sort of balance themselves out overall, but I donât think so.
This is what really tends to happen: one corporation ends up being a lot or even just a little bit better than the others, through some combination of luck, talent and tenacity.
Word gets out and before you know it, everyone wants to work for them and shop there.
Sooner or later all the other corporations have closed shop, and only one remains.
Now they have a monopoly, there are no competitors in this region, and it would be, not impossible, but exceedingly difficult for a small business to rise up and start competing with them.
Now that they have a monopoly, gradually theyâll pay employees as little as possible, and charge consumers as much as possible.
People will just have to accept it if they donât want to go naked.
If a small business rises up and tries to do anything about it, they might not even be able to purchase the resources to do it, because the corporation is buying them all up at a higher price the small business can afford if they have to, outbid them.
Or if the small business manages to get going, theyâll just buy the small business up and either close it down, or keep it going and jack up the prices while lowering the wages, almost everyone has their price, even if they think theyâre on a mission.
And then of course they also use âunderhandedâ tactics, like making laws, rules and regulations suitable to themselves and not suitable to potential rivals/up-and-comers, so you have to do things exactly the way they do them or else.
Hell, they might just pay the mob to burn your business down if necessary, but even without underhanded tactics, thereâs a strong tendency towards monopolization, but the underhanded tactics are inevitable anyway.
You canât really have much of a democracy or capitalist kind of âfreeâ market (itâs not the only kind of free market actually) when you have these megabanks and corporations, where 1% of the people possess 80% of the wealth because they just buy the lawmakers and politicians.
Again, almost everyone has their price.
And thatâs why we started out with nearly pure capitalism and ended up like this, not because of some socialist conspiracy or plot like this guy will try to make it out to be, but because capitalism leads to fewer and fewer competitors over time, and the fewer competitors there are, the more they can cement/solidify their stranglehold on the economy.
It doesnât eve have to get down to just corporation, if thereâs only a few big corporations of roughly equal wealth/power, they can play it safe and partly or fully merge, or they can all agree not to pay workers more than x, or charge consumers more than x, so they donât get into a wage/price war, and one of them will only ever break this rule if they somehow gain a major advantage/disadvantage, which will lead to few competitors still.
As corporations get massive, the only way to compete with them is either through the state, coercively, or through collective bargaining/unions, or through revolution, either that or just acquiesce.
Typically the masses just donât have the foresight to compete very effectively, in part because theyâve swallowed the cool aid, and you end up with these monstrous disparities.