If you were a corporation, becoming a monopoly would be your wet dream. As a company becomes richer and more powerful, it gains more influence over politics. It’s a feedback loop that gives them more and more power until they are monopoly. It’s not the government that drives this, it’s the corporations driving the government.

Oligarchic fits, and isn’t mutually exclusive with being a capitalist. IMHO it seems like that’s an inevitable outcome in capitalist economies if safeguards aren’t instituted. Also I certainly don’t think oligarchies are restricted to capitalist economies, either. It just seems like it would be the natural goal of amassing capital: rig the system in your favor.

Also I don’t want you making up definitions, I just assumed you had another one in mind when trying to define what most modern corporations aren’t.

Interesting stance from someone that thinks socialism is when the government does stuff

? Don’t see what that has to do with this. Are you saying because Stalin and the USSR did something stupid to the aral sea in the 1940’s it’s fine for companies in America to cause massive environmental damages, hurt tons of people, and then keep all the profits they made over decades, declare bankruptcy, and pass the buck of the cleanup on to the American tax payers? Or make horribly risky investments, extract tons of bonuses, high executive compensation, and stock sales, then get bailed out by the US government and US taxpayers because their flimsy scheme had come crumbling down?

I wasn’t trying to make an argument for communism or something if that’s what you’re getting at, fuck that genocidal maniac Stalin, just that private companies in America often pass on their losses to the American people while they keep all the profits. Often by hiding the costs in things like co2 emissions that we’ll all collectively have to pay for later. If they want profits that’s fine, but they should be held responsible for the losses too. And if American taxpayer money and public investment helped a company make profits, some of that should be returned to the taxpayers too. We need effective regulations and laws to make sure these thing happen.