This is big scale capitalism, not free market.

Capitalism is the key problem.

A free market is probably necessary. With a system where everyone has enough to live well, affordable healthcare, equal treatment etc.

A free market ensures a lot of quality standards.

But it is not only competition, improvements and "getting the best, the best way".

It is "making & selling something that people buy, the cheap way". This principle is fundamentally flawed, as environmental protection doesnt pay, and there is no real reason for companies to be good for the enviroment. Like, actually being good.

You can also argue that products enshittified over time (glued together laptops, unnecessarily weak drinking glasses, "IOT-ifying" everything, cheap clothes, throwaway razors, cheap food,...) because there is no value in making good products in a free market, if people get f**ing brainwashed and dont buy stuff based on their value over time.

And equally it is even worse with the environment. As there is no value in protecting the environment, nobody does it. Now laws force companies to list all important data, and this gets converted into some indirect form of money. But not nearly as transparently and freely as a free market. You may get fees or not, you may save some "carbon credits" but these are horrendously underpriced and can be bought with neocolonial freakshows like forcing people out of their own land, to "protect it", as if it would have been destroyed before.

And the main flaw is that there is no big reason to not fake these values. Or not just write down what you already do, and keep it at this. Or do more than needed.

And to the topic, a free market has no stop sign. Companies naturally grow bigger and bigger, get more and more efficient, critical for whole societies that rely on working for them, and thus they are inherently not "neutral possibilities in a free world".

This always leads to huge mega-giants having influence on people, politics etc.

And this leads us to the situation we are currently in. Companies abusing license and patent laws, to cripple the system that even made them possible.

I have no idea why the US is so f**cked up in this graph, but believe me Germany is also horrible.

Trickle down economics does work in a way that ensures basic healthcare for all germans. But meanwhile these damn germans produce a SH**LOAD of stuff.

I have no numbers but it is insane how much utter garbage we produce. And from this endless, insane stream of trash, we always scoop off enough profit to make the 1% even more ugly rich, and keep the said basic human rights intact.

This may work, but it is soooo far from sufficiency.

I really liked the latest video of "Second Thought", about the american dream and capitalisms natural path to fascism