If they could somehow monetize breathing, they would
I used to think this was true too, but then I realized that the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it’s incompatible with democracy and regulation. That’s why literally every capitalist country on earth (including the wealthy ones) has a problem with regulatory capture, corruption, and buyout and supplanting of the actual government.
Capitalism encourages the greediest, trickiest, and most selfish people to rise to the top and stay there through a mixture of brute force and media manipulation. In essence, it’s not much different than totalitarian authoritarian governments, it’s just more subtle.
Look at Fox news and right wing media bubbles for instance, or the Democratic party which opposes ranked choice voting whenever it can and constantly says one thing and does another. Humans are too greedy, selfish, and short-sighted to live and exist for long under a system like capitalism. How do we know this? Look around, climate change and pollution’s already serious and it’s not changing anytime soon.
We’re probably already fucked, and we just don’t know how much we are just yet.
Capitalism builds on competetion but favors behavior which eliminates competitors. This inner tension of capitalism makes it easily degrade into an authoritharian system. But it does not make it the same as one. Regulation is needed to maintain fair competetion which sounds paradoxical but is also a tension in the capitalism as such.
Democracies struggle with capitalism but they struggle much more with planned state. Struggle is in the nature of free agents of democracy, so it does not have to suggest incompatibility.
The issue is that greed is an aspect of human nature. You’ll never be able to eliminate it. Any system that relies on greed, corruption, and selfishness not existing, will ultimately fail, because that system relies on humans pretending that certain emotions don’t exist.
Capitalism is deeply flawed, but it’s stability as a system is not predicated on humans trying (and inevitably failing) to delete fundamental human emotions.
