On the contrary, a capitalist believes there is abundant evidence that increased competition in any market almost always generates positive externalities, and is a net benifit to the community.
Hm. Well, this is reasonable - competition is pretty nice. But if you have a society that's just plain old less efficient than ours - uses lots of human labor rather than industrialization, doesn't have good economies of scale, etc etc - and I go in and open up some store that simply offers lower prices on widgets than the local stores can offer, this doesn't particularly increase competition. The other stores aren't going to build economies of scale overnight, they simply go out of business, and so now I have all the local widget sales.
So 'open a business instead' isn't a thoughtless reflex, it's a carefully considered opinion about what course of action has the highest likelyhood of generating positive results in an uncertain world.
It happens to be a claim that meshes with an identity as "capitalist," and shows signs of being protected from details by the first good argument.
Today's post, Traditional Capitalist Values was originally published on 17 October 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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