joepie91 needs more railing 🚅💦 (🔜 eth0) on Nostr: Speaking as an anti-capitalist, I'd agree with all of this (except *maybe* the ...

Speaking as an anti-capitalist, I'd agree with all of this (except *maybe* the 'standard of living' thing because the methods of measurement are a bit sketchy there), but I'd argue there's a third problem that's missing here: the non-isolation between wealth and regulatory power.

This model assumes that the regulatory power stands above wealth in the hierarchy, and while this is initially true - and I'm going to assume that the regulatory power is benevolent here - this doesn't *remain* true because wealth and influence gained through capitalism can be traded back for regulatory power due to the social value assigned to wealth (which needs to be there for capitalism to 'work' as a concept, or the driving incentive disappears).

But what that means is that if you have regulators keeping capitalists in check, and capitalists slowly amassing wealth and influence that they can use to adjust the regulators, it's only a matter of time until they slowly chip away at the regulatory layer to reduce the restrictions and nudging, which then improves their wealth acquisition, and so on, until eventual regulatory capture. And incentive-wise, this is entirely consistent with capitalism's theory of operation.

So as far as I can see, 'controlled/regulated capitalism' will always turn into uncontrolled capitalism eventually; it can only ever work temporarily, and this matches the actual timeline of events.