this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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Publicly traded companies mean that the people who invested get a say in how the business is run. Those same people are typically riding the success of other people's decisions and have no idea how to not fuck up. So they demand the company make stupid fucking choices or the CEO will be replaced by someone who will listen.
The trick is to remove the power of the board to remove the CEO and keep them as advisors instead of drivers. The CEO should cook and if they drive the business into the ground, that's what happens. 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.
And that's why you have laws and agencies to prevent that like the German Bundeskartellamt.
I'm not familiar with the corporate landscape in Germany, but the US and Canada also have anti-trust law and competition agencies whose purpose is to prevent consolidation. Why hasn't that prevented it?
Because you have an oligarchy
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.
I wouldn't call whatever the US has or had real Democracy to begin with. You only have two viable parties and it's so easy to abuse. Just look at the mess your electoral college ans gerrymandering is.
I'm not fully happy with the German system because we for example can't directly elect our chancellor and president but there at least five parties who jump the 5% hurdle to enter the Bundestag and ten or so others you can directly vote for.
Because nobody enforces the law. There are so many mega corpos that needs to be broken up, but it doesn't happen.