Every 20-30 years, lol
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Monopolies is the wrong word. The correct word is “trust”. Monopolies are just one kind of trust, and any kind of trust, even weak ones, are a deadly cancer to a free market.
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Who's the frump with the technicolor bowtie?
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In addition to my already present uh, biographies...
I would nitpick this actual meme on one point:
Broadly, monopolies and colluding oligopolies do not collude to artificially increase demand.
They collude to artificially increase prices, and that artificially high chunk of prices is also called a monopolist rent.
...
Monopolists grow till there are no alternatives to them, often by first offering a price discount as compared to other competitors...
... then, when they have driven their competition out of business, or just purchased them...
Then they raise prices to the max the consumer can bare.
...
Monopolists notably maximize their own profit often to the point that it actually reduces overall demand.
They can do this because they still have enough people who now just have no alternative, and they can extract so much monopolist remt... maybe we'd call that greedflation in more modern lingo... that they don't care if they lose a few customers, the astounding margins more than make up for it.
(until the entire system collapses sometime later, because OOPS, turns out everyone was going into debt and gambling on wildass longshot investments to be be able to pay those higher prices.)
(but of course then the monopolist just lays off employees to reduce overhead, and hey, now you understand why and how recessions and depressions happen, and why capitalism is fundamentally inequitable and unstable!)
Monopolies don’t generally artificially increase demand. They sometimes artificially restrict supply. But mostly they just control price, because monopolies don’t have to compete, and competition is the fundamental assumption that drives the law of supply and demand.
I am pretty sure that Europe is often described as having free market, also it is often considered to be working pretty good, beside occasional shortcamings, definitely nothing like mass poverty. Altho I wonder what you you mean by capitalism, and why did you put quotes around free, do you think those markets aren't free, or what?
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This happens throughout human history. Repeatedly funneling wealth and power to a few, the system collapses, start all over again. Doesn’t matter if it’s kings or corporations. Must be a genetic component to it, we can’t seem to help ourselves.
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... when was the last time capitalism led to mass starvation and death? Every famine I'm aware of since 1950 has been the cause of either war, recurring environmental issues that have resulted in famines across multiple economic systems, or government mismanagement.
The rest is correct, but the mass starvation and death is a very curious insertion.
Also curious that it's not really a cycle, since the 'free' market is never disestablished or interrupted in the cycle despite being 'established' again at the top of the cycle.
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True capitalism has never been achieved
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