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Intel Fires Back At FTC In Antitrust Suit
adeelarshad82 writes "Intel has responded to the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust investigation, unsurprisingly challenging the FTC's allegations as well as criticizing the agency for what the company calls an attempt 'to turn Intel into a public utility.' The motion is a response to the FTC's December announcement of a lawsuit brought by the FTC, accusing Intel of anti-competitive practices. Intel also goes on to provide a paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal of the FTC's complaint and proposed remedy, although most of the company's response seems designed to promote the impression that those that failed, failed on their own."
The general problem Intel has is that at a default level even before any of the facts are in, chip-making is an area where anti-trust concerns make a lot of sense, more so than they necessary do in other areas (such as software). Chip-making has massive initial start-up cost. Thus, it is like the classic economic example of the steel mill where it is almost impossible for new competitors to enter the market. Thus, even if Intel shows that they haven't actively abused their role (such as the FTC's claims about Intel threatening buyers about loss of discounts in event of them buying from competitors) there might still be a strong case for some form of intervention.
From the article "In 26 statements of "contemplated relief" contained in its complaint, the FTC described what Intel's must do and not do to preserve competition."
Right, because when I think of people who know how to run a business (ya know, an entity with 10 trillion dollars in debt), I think of the Federal government. Who are these people who think they know how to maintain competition? Obviously not people who can make it in the private sector so they go work for the FTC and act like little emporers, "sticking it" to the businesses that they could never succeed against, or within.
Give IBM 700 billion dollars and I guarantee that the unemployment would be well below 10% (or 17% real unemployement). Give 700B to the fed and what happens???
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Give IBM 700 billion dollars and I guarantee that the unemployment would be well below 10% (or 17% real unemployement). Give 700B to the fed and what happens???
Give IBM 700 billion dollars and I guarantee IBM execs will get the most gigantic bonuses ever.
I think you have confused IBM with BoA and J.P. Morgan Chase.
Actually, anti-trust issues are exactly the sort of thing that needs to be handled by the government because no one else is in a position to do so. There are many good reasons for anti-trust issues: 1) large controling companies in industries can hurt customers, stifle competition and stifle innovation. 2) They make industries and the economy as a whole more vulnerable to sudden fluctuations (look what happened in the banking industry. That was in part because the largest banks were too large. Unfortunately, we haven't really dealt with that part of the problem...). The FTC doesn't need to know how to run a business. They just need to know how to identify anti-competitive practices.
Hey, what about putting Wall Street bankers in charge of running the business? They've shown that they can manage money. OH WAIT. No they haven't. They needed to be bailed out by the very same federal government that you hate.
Well, what about putting the leaders of other large manufacturing concerns like GM and Chryslers in charge? They've shown that they can manage money. OH WAIT. No they haven't. They also needed to be bailed out by the very same federal government that you hate.
Fuck.
I could have sworn that at one time, the Athlon was king of the world, then the Core 2 Duo's came out and Intel was king of the world since because AMD hasn't made a superior CPU.
Is Intel supposed to purposefully degrade the quality of their product? What is it that they did that has the FTC crying foul?
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
a big corporation is a big corporation. The name is just a unique identifier.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Give IBM 700 billion dollars and I guarantee that the unemployment would be well below 10% (or 17% real unemployement).
In India, maybe.
Bureaucrats at the FTC don't write the federal budget; that gets decided by congress which is largely owned by business interests.
The US government isn't just some monolith with no capacity for competence; it's pretty much legislators and the military portion of the executive that cause all of the country's problems.
Thus, it is like the classic economic example of the steel mill where it is almost impossible for new competitors to enter the market.
That steelmaking is an area where a lot of people do enter the market. The USA and the UK blew up every steel mill in Germany and Japan during World War II, but, the lead the USA had in steel was destroyed not even 20 years after the war.
This is my sig.
"Preserving competition", which is what the FTC is saying what must be done to do, and "running a business" are distinctly different, and often opposed, goals. Someone running a business wants to eliminate their competition, not preserve it.
Your personal guarantee might be worth something for that proposition if you had the capacity and a legally binding obligation to repay the $700 billion if IBM failed to deliver. But even then, it would be an inducement to try the experiment by mitigating the cost if you were wrong, not a basis for believeing the claim that you make. If you want people to believe that claim, an actual argument with reasoning and/or evidence (preferably, both) would be better than a your personal "guarantee".
IBM would certainly find productive uses for that amount of capital, but part of it would be paying for the mandatory retirement of their US R&D people who did not want to move to India.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Intel got big and powerful by being Microsoft's asshole buddy. And up until now, Intel let Microsoft take all the anti-trust heat. Well, now it's Intel's turn.
its surprising to see how arrogant the intel people in america are, despite the fact that their company has been fined already in other countries like korea for wrongdoing and antitrust. and big time too.
one would think that they would at least have a little bit shame and dignity when facing public this time in an antitrust case. but, they behave totally to the opposite.
it seems you americans tolerate corporate greed and arrogance way too much. now they are devoid of shame too at last. even not faking it.
Read radical news here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOWx-8ecTTI
Sent from your iPad.
Preservation of competition is about maintaing the health of the consumer market. The FTC isn't saying that Intel doesn't know how to make money, but that their practices are threatening to the maintenance of a robust competitive market. Capitalism without a framework of rules and standards that is about as sustainable over the long-term as the communist shadows your sig line is barking at. Take it from a left wing progressive: The policies put forth by Obama are centrist. The center has just been far enough to port long enough that most folks don't recognize it anymore. Oh, and when we gave the Fed those billions, what they did was to prevent a total sieze-up of credit markets, without which large scale economic movement is essentially impossible. What they did there was to save capitalism from the ravages of an underregulated market.
How that myopic, one color fits all vision working for ya?
There is a huge difference between anti-trust action, and State take-over of a company. We've already seen this happen to the Banking and Auto industry. Both have been epic failures on all fronts! Do we as a nation want the Federal Gov taking over the direction of how Intel conducts business and even production?
If any of you said "Yes" to my last question, then you are a Facist/Statist and should be drug out on the street and shot IMHO!!! This cannot be allowed to stand.
Life is not for the lazy.
Right. Because someone having a different view on how business and government mesh and interact means they deserve to be shot for having that opinion..sort of like the opinion you expressed against it?
Hows that freedom working out there?
The Federal Gov't. didn't force a takeover. They said "here's some money, it's comes with strings attached". The banks hoped those strings wouldn't be enforced, but that hasn't been the case(thankfully). A lot of banks have opted to pay the money back. I sincerely doubt this would have been the case if they had just been given a blank check.
The automakers are just F***** and have been for a long time. Their bailout was to soften the blow of all of them going down in close proximity, and at a time when there was no faith in the economy. Maybe it wasn't needed, maybe it prevented a lot of suffering. I'll wait until we're on the other side of this recession to see what the effects were.
Also I love how you say "There is a huge difference between anti-trust action, and State take-over of a company" in your first sentence and then equate the two in your last.
Step 2) Threaten to kill someone for having an opposing view
Step 3) Make yourself and your arguments and your allies look like nut-jobs
Step 4) Ignore Step by Step outline of your problem and continue being a jerk and winning points for your opponents.
you are a Facist/Statist and should be drug out on the street and shot IMHO!!!
Sadly, the emphasis is not my own :/
Standard Oil.
Because Intel only has the consumer's interest in their heart and will never do anything wrong.
Before you say the consumer should decide just remember it was the consumer who decided who is in the government.
No one said the government was taking over Intel and don't you have a town hall meeting to attend to proclaim Obama an illegal immigrant or something?
Freedom is a big part of this issue. There are many uses of the word 'free' and 'Free' markets are not necessarily congruent with a free society. Businesses in free markets don't care about personal liberties. They care about making money. In the absence of any regulation they will do it any way they can. Not because there are not honest moral people in the business world. But because unregulated capitalism is an inevitable race to the bottom. Yes slavery is wrong, child labor is wrong and sweatshops are wrong. But if my competitor is doing it, and he's producing the product much cheaper than I, then I will have to find a way to reduce MY labor costs to zero or go out of business. In the US, we have workplace safety laws, environmental dumping laws and child labor laws, all brought on by the historical excesses of the free market. Anti-trust also has a firm grounding in history. Because of the breakup of Standard Oil we have much more freedom of personal transportation that we would have. Because of the breakup of AT&T I no longer have to call the phone company if I want to move my phone to a different room in the house. Because of anti-trust litigation against IBM we have cheap personal computers and, ironically, Microsoft.
"You never pushed a noun against a verb except to blow up something" (Spencer Tracey, 'Inherit the Wind')
We just need to make a law from the following principal:
Giving a discount based on the quantity a customer buys - Good Legal Business Idea
Giving less of a discount based on the quantity of competitors products a customer buys - Antitrust problem.
That's the problem: incompetent companies should NOT be bailed out.
With Intel's restrictions on Netbooks on their Atom platform, it looks like Prima Facie evidence of restraint of trade.
Intel is going to be knocked around quite a bit, if they don't wise up.
... hi bingo
if AMD went out of business and Intel cornered the market? How does that affect me as a consumer?
Somebody please explain that.
Intel also put out a lot of BS says that AMD is bad / does not work right and they also push there own mother boards that some cost more and have less stuff on them then others with the same chipset.
also they are now trying to lock out 3rd prat chipsets and on board video chips and replicating them with there own shit video build in to the cpu.
One of the problems is that Intel was proven to pay OEM's (Dell specifically) a large sum of money to delay the launch of Opteron based products. It's a long read but to get a better handle on this, I suggest reading New York's antitrust suit: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22112342/Nyag-v-Intel-Complaint-Final
They said "here's some money, it's comes with strings attached"
Actually it was more like "They said "here's some money, it does not comes with strings attached please save us from impending doom!11!!"
Because your someone who has absolutely no understanding of civil society. You believe in the myth that government is meant to take care of the people. You think, for some reason, that the "military" is a cause of all the problems, when it is simply an appendage of the civilian government (at least in western democracies). Of all the things the government does, the military is actually something that it is constitutionally designed to do. But I'm sure you dont care about the constitution.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
I dont quite understand what you mean, "capitalism without a framework". What framework does capitalism have? I understand the role of government, but by and large it has been disastrous. Capitalism doesnt have a framework. In fact, a free society and a capitalism is the antithesis of a "framework". The government is what is suppose to have a "framework", which you progressives tend to want to ignore as best you can.
By calling Obama centrist, you are either being deceptive and obtuse, or you are ignorant of the progressive agenda of the people in power. If its the later (which I doubt), I recommend reading Sal Alinsky and cloward-piven strategy. Only the non strategic thinking progressive would see the shelling out of billions of dollars to failing businesses as "centrist". The "right minded" progressive understands that this is a tactic to bring the system down.
The truth is coming out about the economic collapse. Congratulations about the "failings of capitalism". Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two government entities, lead the charge straight off the cliff (through the Community Reinvestment Act). It was government regulation that caused our recent problems, created the housing bubble, and you want to lead everyone to believe that more regulation is the way to do it? Seriously?
I'd take underregulated markets any day over government intervention.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
When I was at Transmeta, we were killing ourselves to get the Crusoe into an IBM Thinkpad. It was going really well, and the apparent design win was awesome news, because when you get a "design win" (your chip used in a product) with IBM, it's a big rubber stamp on your forehead that says "SAFE VENDOR," and a lot more business tends to flow your way.
This is secondhand, but we were told that what killed the deal is that Intel found out about the impending design win, then called up IBM and threatened to deprioritize shipments of their zillions of Intel chips to IBM if they didn't give Crusoe the boot. This would have hurt a huge portion of IBM's business.
I was just an engineer, so I don't know if this was for real or just an exec blowing sunshine up our asses, but I believe it. I had heard years earlier directly from the horse's mouth that AMD was spending $40M/year just to defend itself from Intel lawsuits, many of them clearly designed to just overburden the company with a mountain of legal work.
I think Intel is a really impressive company that does incredible engineering work, but I feel they have crossed ethical lines several times. Frankly, we make Microsoft out to be the bad guy, but I think they're just as inept at being bad guys as they are at software development, so it's easier to catch them in the act. I think Intel has been the real creep, but they're just better at it, so we don't notice.
That doesn't hurt the incompetent company. That only hurts the incompetent company's counter-parties.
After all, I am strangely colored.
It was competition using a different technology.
The happened to nearly every postwar US industry. Basically, US capital stock was not destroyed, and, with no competition, there was no perceived need to invest in it, so they didn't. A lot of those plants shuttered in the 1970s and 1980s were based on 1930s tech. Presses, stamping machines, etc, were all OLD. But Japan and Germany had to start from scratch - and frankly, Japan was never industrialized even prior to WWII, so they tended to get newer equipment which, was less used up, had better tolerances, and from there, better quality.
This is my sig.
Yeah, there were way too many red herrings in that barrel to have anything to do with the actual case.
(Nail that barrel shut before the gulls get to it.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Had we seen fair market pressure, I'm tending to think that the 8086 would have died the death a long time ago.
In fact, I'm tending to agree with the idea that intel's need to sell processors is the only remaining reason for the continued existence of the desktop PC.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Government takeover of intel is a great idea!
Best way possible of seeing to it that the 8086 line could disappear like it should have decades ago.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Actually, my impression is that running a business is not at odds with maintaining healthy competition.
Smart businessmen actually prefer a healthy economic environment.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I can remember when a marketing ploy like "intel inside" would have gotten intel laughed out of the industry. I remember similar marketing slogans in the mid-80s that were generally viewed as, and mostly proved to be swan songs.
Blatantly tooting your own horn is usually detrimental to market share.
(Except in pro wrestling, where the market is not really interested in anything meaningful.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
By calling Obama centrist, you are either being deceptive and obtuse
By averge democratic country standards, President Obama is a moderate centrist/right-winger.
In the US, I suppose political terms must all mean different things to what they mean in Europe. 'Liberal' is a term of abuse used by right-wingers against left-wingers in the US, but in Europe many right-wingers would describe themselves as 'true liberals'.
(I'm assuming you think he's a 'socialist'; if that's not what you meant I'm sorry I misunderstood.)
No time for a concerted thesis on this, esp since we're going pretty far afield, as is good and proper in such a forum. Perhaps more later if I find myself with the time. Some Thoughts: The system was already going down. I smelled the crap in Greenspan's pants from halfway across the country. The Community Reinvestment Act, as it was originally designed, was put in place to help alleviate the institutional racism experienced by African American communities which were subjected to discrinatory lending practices. It was in later revisons of the bill (under considerably more conservative stewardship...unless you'd argue that George HW, Clinton and W, along with their attendent congresses fall to the LEFT of Carter and his) that pried open the regulatory controls that surrounded the act and ushered in such wonderful products as Securitized NINA Loan Bundles (which gave rise to two loads in the aforementioned Fed Chair's pants: a white one in the 90's, then a brown one at the outset of the recent unpleasantness). I don't want further regulation, I want proper regulation. The type of regulation that's aimed at preserving that other great American value: equality. Unfettered capitalism gave us the glory days of scrip and blacklung, and it would lead us right back there in pursuit of the bottom line if we let it. Alinsky was an advocate of social, economic and political change through deomocratic community action, not communism or socialism. The informed and organized actions of citizens are a natural market force, able to create an economic and govenmental system which is a steward of the people as opposed to an exploiter of them. Long term, Alinsky is as much a friend of yours as he is of mine. Cloward and Piven were dolts. I did, in point of fact, catch the part where you said I'm either a liar, or just an idiot. Well done on the artful language, and not at all in bad form. After all, I started by covering 'whatever, McCarthy' in about a half-inch of rhetorical soil. Cheers.
There is a lot of statist activity since Reagan, and unfortunately it has acted as nitrogen in an algae bloom. Arguing against statism and socialism is not an argument for unfettered capitalism. Unfortunately, this is the straw man argument of the left, either you are for their version of society, or you are for anarchy, robbing children, dragging old people into the street to be shot, etc.. No, the argument of most of those "tea bagging, red necks" (to quote a homophobic racist term thrown around by the intellectual, compassionate, tolerant left) is for "least" amount of government that functions within the strictures of constitutional governance. We understand there is good with the bad, but we also understand that government generally makes things worse, so the least amount of interference is better. In a housing market without government interference, you would not have Freddie Macs and Fannie Maes. While I dont buy the "Community Reinvestment Act" compelled all the bad loans that occured, I do blame Freddie and Fannie which are government backed for creating the bubble which ultimately caused our current financial crisis.
The arguments of Alinsky and Cloward-Piven is predatory. Prey upon the fears and the needs of the masses to implement centralized authority (which works outside of the constitution). In the case of C-P it is to work within the system to overwhelm and discredit it, while at the same time causing more people to become dependent on it. The argument against "benevolent" government can be seen in every inner city across the United States (which are predominately controlled by those who subscribe to the teachings of Alinsky).
20th century Marxism is not progress...
So, when you said "Capitalism doesnt have a framework. In fact, a free society and a capitalism is the antithesis of a "framework," and I responded with a broad attack on the history of laissez-faire capitalism in our country (and others, for that matter), I was implying you were making an argument for violent anarchy, somehow? You just used a strawman to paint a picture of a strawman suit on a pseudo-specific argument. I'm impressed. Seriously. You bullshit like I bullshit, and we should do this more often. Also, when we on the left use the term 'teabagger' as pejorative, it is with a deep sense of irony. Considering that those who identify with the "Tea Party" and all of it's iterations not only tend to be homophobes (and nothing is quite so easy on the schadenfreude organ of the average homo/bi-sexual as needling a raging homophobe, regardless of political affiliation, with gay sex jokes), but they actually used the term to describe themselves first. All praise be to Glenn Beck for that-un. High-larry-oos. As to the link between 'benevolent' government and the persistence of geographic and racialy poverty (if i've misunderstood the conncetion you're making, please let me know) I would argue that, in a pre-welfare system, 'benevolent' capitalists didn't do a whole lot for poor folk, either. Poverty is an old problem after all, and will take a long, concerted, expensive effort to have a serious impact on. Programs of said nature are just, but have the nasty side effect of being bad for short profits. Add in a healthy dose of buyable influence (yes, my commie ass wants publicly funded elections), and you have a perfect storm that keeps them from being implemented. And antitrust is still important. Also.
No matter how you sugar coat it, "Redneck teabagger" is both racist and homophobic, no matter how you rationalize it (such as calling all Tea Party activists homophobes). The phrase who "tea bag" concept came from a campaign where anti-socialist activists mailed "tea" to congressmen as an expression of contempt to unconstitutional expansion of government authority (please, can we just skip over article 1 section 8 of the constitution already, Madison dismissed it out of hat in the federalist papers over 200 years ago).
In the "pre-Federal-welfare" system, the capitalist created jobs for "poor folk". Most of the outrages committed by capitalists during the early years were committed with complicity of some form of government (think Taft). Capitalists laid railroads, built power plants, created hospitals, and on and on and on. The benefits of the capitalists have changed the world from commercial aviation, the auto-mobile, to advances in medicines which cure the diseases that have wiped out the "poor".
Why do people who generally do not believe in God or religion think that it is a good idea to take from the strongest producers? To punish on a graduating scale success? It cant be because of "Christian Charity" since progressives dont believe in God or Christ. When was the last time a corporation marched people into the rice patties or into the gas ovens?
When was the last time a corporation has caused a massive famine, or engineered a massive region of crop failures (such as whats going on in California today)? Our government in its current state has the audacity to turn off the water to the farms in the San Fernando valley to protect an endangered species of fish, with the resulting effect is having the most productive farm region in our nation requiring food aide. This is reflective of the Ukraine during the 1920's - 1930's, with government intervention causing famine. Fortunately for the people of California, the United States has a lot of farm land that hasnt been marked, but the government has shown that it can and will destroy the lives of over 50,000 people for... a fish.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Just for the record, you don't have to be white to be a redneck, or gay to suck balls. Capitalists built railroads on the backs of pressed Chinese and Irish workers, built power plants that ruined rivers, created hospitals that only the only the wealthy can afford and on and on. The issue we are having in this little back and forth is that we're both stubborn bastards, so I'll drive to the heart of the issue to maybe get us to a more peaceful place on all this. What we're talking about here is the corruption of those in power. Whether you're speaking of the great capitalist magnate, or the sitting Senator from whereverthehell, that person has fair odds of being ambitious, self-serving and greedy. So people get screwed. Doesn't really matter which one is in charge, really. If you de-bone the government of all authority, you create a vaccuum of power. In Capitalism EVERYTHING is a commodity. So who do you think would fill the void? Rugged Montana survalists who grow their own corn and hunt their own fur? Single mothers with two shitty jobs? Middle managers of telemarketing firms? Hardly. Same goes on the other side of the coin. I ain't such a fan of the Hugo Chaves model either, truth be told. A public education, a library card and a voter registration ID are more accessible to the common citizen than appreciable economic wealth and influence. I would rather strengthen government and be able to vote out those who screw over the people, than to weaken it and be beholden to the profit motive in a system that dictates that vastly more lose than win. I'm ranting. Let me reel it back in. Taft was a Plutocrat in a time of corporate ownership of government. Just like Dick Cheney, Hank Paulson, Bush Jr., Bush Sr, Tim Giethner, JFK, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissenger, and yeas the savior himself Barrack Obama, too. None of those assholes were, or are, owned by communists. I lied, I'm not done ranting. Do you know why we're having issues with farming in places like the San Fernando valley? Because we're chasing an impossible dream. We want to all get rich and eat steaks and fuck models, but we can't. No matter how far we grow the economy, it won't be enough. The indefinite expansion of wealth is not sustainable. There isn't enough stuff. We're losing the rainforests, ecosystems are collapsing (thanks for bringing up nitrogen in algae blooms, btw. put me in mind of the dead zone in the Gulf, and then the huge trash soup patch in the Pacific to name a few) and a preponderance of evidence points to it keeping on going, and it being our damn fault. Capitalism is blind to the distant future, and myopic at best concerning any cost or reward outside of quarterly cost and profit. It only self regulates with these things to guide it, and when the end comes, and it all crashes down, some derivatives whiz is going to die, last and smiling, with trillions of fucking dollars because he bet it would happen that way. Winner, winner, chicken dinner. Why the hell do you think we have an impossibly huge derivatives and credit markets to come crashing down in the first place? It's because we need more money, and we can't compete in terms of labor end environmental costs in the industrial markets while still making sure our people can eat and breathe, so we've started conjuring money out of thin air to keep the machine going. Oh, and Enron is the answer you're looking for. A state with better than 120% of peak power needs, due to the de-regulation of energy markets, allowing one company (unless you want to try to paint them as nefarious agents of Stalin In leage with Alinsky and the Teletubbies, or whatever) to drive prices up by caging supply while creating rolling brownouts/blackouts to create the illusion of scarcity. We need a stong government just as much as we need strong markets. It sucks, really, but if you vest too much power in a single system that can separate itself from accountability, it breaks everything. You get shantytowns, you get Hitler, you get a slave trade, you get Mao. Oh, and on
Can you please use paragraphs. Its really hard to sort out your ideas, if you do not break them into paragraphs.
Ok, so we have something in common, we both dislike corruption. The difference is your faith in strong government, and my inherrent distrust of strong government. We both agree that in a vacuum, a system tilt towards equilibrium (never achieving equilibrium, no system ever really reaches balance, right?) either being filled by strong government or strong corporations/business people. Both strong government and strong corporations are prone to corruption. Businesses may have polluted rivers, caused garbage heaps, wrecked eco systems, etc, but governments have caused massive famines (USSR and China), created acts of genocide (Nazi Germany), and devastated massive swaths of lands on weapons testing (all nuclear nations). You point out that corrupt governors can be voted out of power, but corruption tends to lead to a place where voting out becomes impossible (Hugo Chavez is a good example).
Businesses start out with a simple goal. Produce a good or service that is in demand. How many governments have started out with their implicit goal of mass murdering Jews, Muslims, or Christians? How many governments have come to power through revolutionary means with the revolutionaries seeking to cause famine that kills 10's of millions of people? Especially when those revolutionaries primary motive is to create equality. Businesses may treat everything as a commodity, but governments treat everyone as a statistic. Whats worse? In one system you can improve your value, in the other, your just a 1 or a 0. Why do you believe that strong government will treat people better than businesses?
The issues of farming in the San Fernando valley have nothing to do with wanting to screw models and eat steak. It has to do with government interfering in the private market. The problem with excess and promiscuity is a morality issue. Your a liberal detesting life styles promoted by liberals. I agree that excessive life styles are a problem, and this mentality was exasperated by the governments interference in the housing market through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Sure, corporations made huge short term profits through selling mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, but would they have made the stupid mistakes if the government wasnt buying? I detest crony capitalism, and I strongly believe that if government was not involved in the housing market, the bubble would have never happened, those big money institutions would have been more cautious, knowing that even the largest things can die. But they didnt have to worry because a strong government was there to bail them out.
You point out shanty towns as an example of capitalism, I point out New Orleans as an example of government. The victims of hurricane Katrina were primarily wards of the federal government. The key problem that we are dancing around is fairly simple. How do we get the most, to the most amount of people. And by "most" that can mean wealth, or fundamental needs, or what have you. Neither a strong federal government, nor strong capitalism will make sure all people, have all needs met. There will always be winners or losers. The question is in the creation of winners or losers. Under socialism, the government picks winners and losers. In capitalism, everyone has a chance to win or lose, based on their own merit and chance. The question boils down to which do you prefer.
20th century Marxism is not progress...