You posted this on a pro-capitalism community, but never actually responded to it or explained what was wrong with it. Since Lemmy (and probably the Fediverse as a whole) is largely left-leaning, I think that’s an important thing to do, and I’m going to see what I can do about it. I generally responded to sections of the original article in the order that they appear.

Who Owns The Gold? First off, there are a couple reasons the miners don’t get to keep the gold they found. The main one is because that’s the deal they agreed to. The owner would pay them their wage no matter what they found, but if they found any gold it went to him. They didn’t have to agree to that deal, but they did, and they’re the ones voluntarily giving up the gold for a reliable wage.

This leads into the second reason, which is that the owner may not see a return on his investment, but the workers always will. He’s the one taking the risk. If no gold is found, the worker still gets paid, but the owner suffers a pretty big loss. If the gold the miners dug up belonged to them, then no one’s going to pay them a wage, so they’d have to be okay with the possibility of not finding anything and consequently not getting any money.

Thirdly, the owner is the one who owns the mine. If I knew that, in my backyard, there was a bar of gold buried a few feet down, and I paid my neighbor to dig a hole to it, who should get the bar of gold? I own the land, and therefore the lands resources, and the neighbor was already paid for digging the hole. I could have paid the neighbor to dig a hole without any prospects of gold, and it would be the same for him. Why does the content of the hole entitle him to more money (but not less money in the event the contents are worthless)?

Large Initial Capital Investments I do think that there’s an answer to the problem of rising capital investments needed to introduce yourself as new competition, but I haven’t found a detailed explanation of it yet. Some common objections to this idea A) monopolies are caused by government intervention, not trends in free markets, and B) innovation drives feasible entrepreneurship. I haven’t found detailed explanations for these that specifically explain why the trend hyposethized here isn’t real though. I will note though that this gestures at the Fediverse exists as a form of competition to main stream social media platforms despite those seeming like they should require a large initial capital investments.

For what it’s worth, I that having most of the new competition come from rich people is fine. That still produces competition, which forces companies to provide higher quality goods and services for cheaper.

One Monopoly To Rule Them All The socialist solution to monopolies, though, is worse. It’s kind of one big monopoly. Not different monopolies for different markets, one monopoly for everything. Furthermore, this monopoly could force you to use its product, and disallow any competition that could put pressure on it to provide quality services. This monopoly, on top of being in charge of every good and service, has none of the incentives it ideally would. Even if it were democratic there are problems. Who decides what we vote on? Who decides the options that are available to vote on? How do you determine what each individual wants, how much they want it, how much they want it in comparison to everyone else, and how many resources you can spend making it, in any way that doesn’t involve long periods of time and excessive bureaucracy. How would you do this without a measure for value that incorporates the scarcity of resources, the difficulty in producing goods and services, and the demand for goods or services?

Scarcity As for scarcity, we are still severely hampered by it. We don’t have unlimited time, natural resources, artificial resources (since they take natural resources to make), know-how, drive, in fact, I can’t think of a single thing that we do have an unlimited amount of. Sure, we might have enough food to feed everybody, but do we have enough to feed everybody the very best? Of course not.

It is sometimes advantageous to limit supply, but competition tends to force that behavior out. People don’t like planned obsolescence in their phones, so the more prevalent it is, the more likely that competitors sell phones that are about the same price but last longer. Other cases of artificial scarcity come from government intervention. People would make lots of cheap housing, but the government has lots of standards that are difficult to meet or simply won’t let you build more houses on a specific plot of land.

Automation I don’t understand the “But under capitalism, we are afraid of that automation because it will eliminate millions of jobs” bit. Are we going to utilize government intervention to prevent automation to keep our jobs? If so, that isn’t capitalism anymore. Capitalists love automation if it can more efficiently make goods or more efficiently perform services.