Love all the support for capitalism here - especially since (likely) none are actual capitalists.

Are you working for your money? You're a laborer.

Is your money working for you (so you don't have to)? Capitalist.

Don't get me wrong - capitalism has done some pretty great things - but we're at a point now that any innovation still happening is solely to increase profits for the owners (actual capitalists) - Pretty simple concept actually.

Once a company gets big enough, they have their thumbs on the scale making it incredibly difficult for them to fail. Once we're conditioned to pay $10 for a widget that costs $1 to make, all the innovation goes into figuring out how to make the same thing for 90 cents. Usually the newer (improved!) version is not quite as good, but folks don't notice right away and eventually get conditioned to lower quality. Does the consumer cost go down? Hell no - why should it? Why should we sell something for $9 when folks will pay $10. Actually, we can throw some marketing $$ at it and charge $12, chalking up the increase to inflation or increased performance.

In a perfect capitalistic world (doesn't exist) another company would be able to exploit this increasing gap and launch a competing product. It usually fails b/c the barrier to entry is too high, they get purchased by Company A before they become a legitimate threat, or Company A simply lowers prices to an unsustainable level until Company B is out of business.

The fallacy is to believe that capitalism is about creating wealth, when it's actually about the concentration of wealth. Does anyone really believe it's a coincidence that wealth inequality has increased dramatically in the last 30 years while wages have remained stagnant?