People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
Their definition of efficiency is extremely specific and only relevant to capitalists (economic efficiency is defined as maximizing profit, basically, making every other efficiency consideration secondary).
Capitalists literally live in their own little world. You want to know how capitalist economists defend the idea that scarcity is a basic feature of human existence? You can always imagine wanting more. For them, wanting another yacht in your fleet is the same kind of scarcity as dying of malnutrition and we can’t and shouldn’t try to distinguish them analytically.
That’s exactly right, and the problem is that people hearing terms like freedom and efficiency tend to assume that they’re the ones benefiting.