I agree with the point you made above. We need stronger antitrust laws to ensure that all of our industries are characterized by competition.
You are complaining about powerful business interests, and yet you are just repeating what you read in the newspapers published by those in power. The way I see it, the Marxism that you practice is just a reincarnation of Christianity (with its concepts of the original sin and atonement). I don't know much about the techniques they use to break people free from cults, so I won't be investing a lot of time into trying to wake you up.
I made specific remarks about business interests and hierarchy, but now you're lumping my ideas in with Marxism (and later on socialism) and religion. If you continue to put words in my mouth and make personal attacks, I'm no longer interested in this conversation.
Not if the company is competitive and cares about making a profit in the long run.
Any large company is forced to focus on short-term profits. One reason is because investors want to see profits soon, or they'll move to another company. Another reason is that any company focusing on long-term profits with the accompanying investments will be driven out of the market by companies seeking short-term profit.
Saying that something comes "at the expense of people", is as valid as saying that people get their treatment at the expense of the firm.
What I mean with "at the expense of people" is that for-profit institutions have an interest in decreasing wages, longer work hours, a cheaper workplace with less health and safety regulations etc. etc.
The companies would take care of their workers if they were also the consumers. Ford did this a long time ago. But at this point, capital can move all over the world and will settle in places where there are far more people than jobs. For example, the electronics industry in China and the clothing industry in Bangladesh.
Most of the innovations that made the modern world were made as a result of the profit motive and despite all of the regulations.
This is not true. Most innovations are the result of publicly funded research. Let's take a smartphone, which has a microprocessor, memory, GPS, a touchscreen, a battery, etc. It connects to the internet and does signal processing. All developed at (mostly US) universities, initially meant for the miliary, and paid out of the military budget. These were later adapted for consumer use by the general public. Some, such as the transistor, were developed at AT&T's Bell Labs at the time when AT&T was given a monopoly by the US government and acted almost as a government-run institution. Bell Labs also gave us Unix, C, C++... The basis of modern computing science applications.
As for "climate change", if there is any pressure on the scientists to favour a side, then it can no longer be called "science". It had been well documented that scientists who provide evidence contradicting the "climate change" narrative place their careers in danger. So, until things change, none of this field can be considered to be credible. Talking about "climate change" is just another ritual in that religion of yours.
I don't see why the scientific method that brought us the modern world would suddenly fail completely when it comes to climate science. Surely, there will have been isolated cases of what you have described, as there are in any large field, but there isn't any evidence that climate science or change as a whole is a fraud.
On the contrary, there have been major efforts by the fossil fuel industry to cause confusion over whether climate change is real. Both trough think tanks likes Heartland and direct government lobbying. That's because the fossil fuel industry realizes very well that climate change is happening and that the general public will rightfully demand regulations sooner or later, which in turn will harm profits.
They cannot provide evidence to the contrary, as there isn't any to speak of, so the tactic became to discredit the science and advocate "skepticism" towards established facts.
Every country that tried socialism during the 20th century had to become a dictatorship. Socialism can't survive otherwise. It is a feature, not a bug.
Just to clarify, I'm not advocating a jump or revolution to some kind of socialism. Any kind of system that is imposed on people will almost certainly fail. What I am in favor of, is to regulate for-profit institutions and to reform unjustifiable hierarchies with something more democratic. These steps are possible within the current system. I was originally talking about health care, which is a good example, but it does apply to other sectors as well.
It's depends on what you call "socialism" exactly, but there hasn't been a country so far which has tried to make its society more democratic and somehow ended up as a dictatorship. That's simply impossible. There have been attempts at "state socialism" or "state capitalism", which combine socialist ideas with an authoritarian government, if that's what you're referring to, but that's not a model of society that I'd advocate.
What I would advocate could probably be best described as anarcho-syndicalism and the closest any country has come to this is Catalonia during 1936 - 1939. It was ultimately conquered from the outside, and did not evolve into a dictatorship.
As for Cuba, see
http://econweb.umd.edu/~davis/eventpapers/CUBA.pdf
"Finally, our paper provides an answer to a long running Cuban controversy, the road not taken. Did the revolutionary regime raise income per capita relative to what would have occurred if the revolution had not taken place? There are no good estimates of current Cuban income so our conclusions on this point are tentative. As best as we can tell,
current income is well below its pre-revolutionary peak suggesting that despite possible accomplishments elsewhere the revolution permanently reduced Cuban income per capita."
I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me for not having the time to dive into a 60 page paper. I've browsed through it and read bits here and there, but as far as I can see, this paper does not mention the harsh US sanctions imposed shortly after the revolution anywhere. The embargo not only impacted Cuba's wealth, but also had humanitarian consequences (food, medicine, general health). With this major factor not taken into account, the conclusion that the revolution led to less wealth cannot be drawn.
Just to be sure, I never held up Cuba as a model society. I only used it as an example of a poor country with relatively good health care, purely because of the way it's organized.
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