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Question about price discovery and competition in american capitalism (feddit.dk)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I've been listening to Aquired recently (podcast about company origin stories) and when talking about privately owned companies (for instance, the recently Mars Inc. episode) they always do back of napkin estimated earnings because the company is private, which apparantly means they don't have to disclose earnings.

But in my country, Denmark, every company earning above 50.000 DKK (=7853 USD) has to disclose earnings. I believe this is for price discovery purposes, so that other entrepreneurs can see how much margin companies have and try to compete if they earn too much money, which is an important part of capitalism, right?

How come this is not required in USA, the "home" of capitalism? If I'm not mistaken of course, my apologies if so.

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[โ€“] -1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The USA is not capitalist in the sense most people (e.g. Adam Smith) mean. It is a protectionist oligarchy, that is capitalist only in the sense that it protects those with capital over all else. Monopolies and trade restrictions protect the capital class at the cost of the populace, and most laws are now written by corporations who hand them to their sponsored representatives. It is exactly what Adam Smith warned against.

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  • [โ€“] 9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    The US Empire is capitalist in Smith's sense, though. The US still operates on commodity circulation, private ownership of capital, etc. Smith was just wrong in thinking the invisible hand would fix everything (along with other issues like the way he categorized fixed and circulating capital being a step back from Quesnay and the physiocrats).

    The "protectionist oligarchy" was in capitalism from the beginning of its formation, what's important to recognize is that systems grow and change through their own compulsions and contradictions. Capitalism necessarily centralizes and expands over time, and the state exists to keep that system going.

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  • [โ€“] -3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It really isn't. Smith argued (I agree wrongly) that the invisible hand of a free market would correct everything, but that monopolies and restrictions distort the market and that the worst thing we could do would be to allow corporations to dictate law. That was my point. The US has set up too many barriers to entry to reasonably claim it is free market, and corporations have absolute control over the current government.

    Any reasonable reading of Smith's Wealth of Nations would be socialist anyway. He outright stated that the capital class had a responsibility to entirely pay for the expenses of the state in caring for the populace.

    The better discussion of Smith would be what industries could reasonably be capable of sustaining an actually free market. I would argue that housing, communications, agriculture, and healthcare are impossible to de-monopolize due to practical spatial limitations and therefore would have to be under state control, given Smith's statement that capitalism's invisible hand only works in a free market.

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  • [โ€“] 6 points 1 year ago

    Even in Smith's time, the state was already a tool of the capitalist class and centralization was occuring. It wasn't what it looks like today, of course, but today isn't fundamentally different at its core. The US is capitalist today, just at a later stage.

    Secondly, capitalists paying for social safety nets isn't socialism. If you want an actual dive on socialism built off of Adam Smith instead of Marx, a fun thought experiment, I recommend the article Adam Smith's Socialism.

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