it's certainly possible, in some cases, that capitalism's incentives encourage people to work hard for the betterment of society, and get a reasonable reward for doing so.
in practice, in many cases, capitalism's incentives simply encourage people to be greedy. *one* way to act on that greed is to work hard for the betterment of society, but without careful and constant regulation and other governmental actions to align incentives with social betterment, it is often possible to take advantage of various points where the reward is larger than the contribution to the betterment of society.
among the problems is that capitalism doesn't provide a particular incentive for private entities to improve the commons. this is left to the government. so things like basic inventions and fundamental intellectual breakthroughs often don't happen at private companies, as these days it requires massive investment with uncertain outcomes, especially as the intellectual breakthrough may be years ahead of a real profit opportunity that comes from bringing that advance to market.
so the government make many advances through programs like the manhattan project, the space program, and early internet research and development (darpa and mostly public universities, although some private universities we part of it as well).
after these great ideas and intellectual advances our public, along come companies to convert those new ideas and technologies into products for profit.
what they're really doing is taking advantage of the government handing out those intellectual goodies for free to companies eager to take advantage of them. imagine how much profit they would make if they had to pay the government a reasonable price for use of those ideas, which would have been patented had they been developed privately? sure, they're adding value and deserve a profit for innovating those products into the market, but essentially the government taxed the rest of us to do all the research to create patent-worthy ideas, but then handed the profit *we* should be earning from doing so over to these businesses.
i'm not necessarily saying the government should have kept these advances secret, or should be charging businesses for such things, but i am saying that it pisses me off when businesses go around claiming that they invented all this stuff and shouldn't have to pay taxes and all that, because a lot of these companies wouldn't exist at all, or wouldn't be anything near as profitable, without government investment and effective intellectual giveaways.
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