Quote Originally Posted by medicinal
[color=Purple]Smith believed that while human motives are often selfish and greedy, the competition in the free market would tend to benefit society as a whole by keeping prices low, while still building in an incentive for a wide variety of goods and services. Nevertheless, he was wary of businessmen and argued against the formation of monopolies.[/COLOR] The last line is where we are today, monopolized! That is how capitalists work, they buy the competition and raise the price or lower the quality of the product. Look around, pick an industry, all the mom and pop stores are being mobbed by corps. (Wallmart). Capitalism is fine as long as the super rich don't get all the businesses and have everyone else work for them for shit wages. What has happened here in the last 20 years has about wiped the little guy off the map, Take farming for example; 95% of the farms are owned by 2% of the people, used to be the other way around! One could name thousands of businesses that have succumed to big business, all consolidating to make a huge conglomerate and remove the individual business owner from the field. Greed is ok if it is controlled, get too greedy and we whack your pee-pee!!
Blaming big corporations for society's problems is narrow minded and short sighted. While I have sympathy for the little guy and the mom-n-pop operations that have been put out of business, I have enough of an open mind to realize that, in the long run, this is not bad.

It is all about efficiency and economies of scale. Big corporations get that big, and can drive the little guy out of business, because they can. This may seem like an obvious statement but think about it. If what they were doing was so bad, they wouldn't succeed. In contrast, if what the little guy was doing was so good, they wouldn't be driven out of business.

Take the plight of the Mom-n-Pop bookstores for example. Companies like Amazon and Barnes have all but wiped them out. Sad, this is true, but why did it happen? Well, I can look back to when I used to go to the smaller independent bookstores myself. Maybe they'd have what I was looking for, many times not. What if I was looking for a certain subject but didn't know the book? Out of luck. With a company like Amazon I can search for a particular subject and have hundreds of choices, most in stock, and usually for a better price than at the local bookstore. Amazon and Barnes have succeeded where the little guys have failed because the former provides a service the latter can not.

To blame increasing prices on the big corporations is also incorrect. Increasing prices are driven by inflation and inflation is driven by more money being put into the economy. If these big corporations were so bad for the majority of Americans there would be less money in the economy and prices would fall. If the big corporations refused to lower their prices, their sales would drop and they, themselves, would go out of business. It's basic economic principle.

One big benefit of big corporations is that they drive innovation. Ever wonder how much $ is put into R&D for something like an iPOD, a Pentium, or even A Ford Taurus? Millions and Millions. Sure, HP might have been born in a little garage in Palo Alto, CA but it wasn't until they became a big corporation that they could actually start producing products that we use today. Beyond just R&D costs, what about production costs? The company I work for sells the equipment, that test the computer chips, that go into everything from the computer you're using now to toys in McD's happy meals. One of these test systems can cost a million+ $. Companies that make these chips will ften have 50 of these systems to keep up with demand. ow many Mom-N-Pop's do you know that could afford $50 million worth of test equipment. Let alone all the other equipment to get a chip from silicon to it's place on the motherboard.

From what I've seen, people who have problems with capitalism and big corporations are typically those for whom the system has not worked so well. But, is that the systems fault???? Take another look at the HP example, this company was literally born in someones garage. Isn't that the definition of the "little guy". So, is what people are saying that it's ok to be an unsuccessful "little guy" but wrong to succeed? Think about it.