system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: People who believe that capitalism has no significant downsides are just as foolishly naive as the communists they love to ridicule

Here's one of the most common pro-capitalist arguments I hear: 

guy A and guy B each start a business, let's say they're both grocery stores and are competitors. In the beginning they both charge similar prices and get roughly the same amount of customers. 

But then guy A takes the customers for granted and starts charging 125% of what he originally was. Unsurprisingly, he loses most of his customers to guy B's store. Guy A's business fails because of his greed, the end.

In another timeline, guy A decides to undercut his competition and charge 90% of what he originally was. Now guy B loses most of his customers and guy A's business gets more profit, as although they make less money from each individual sale they get more sales in total.

Simple, right? In this hypothetical situation, it is in the best interest of the vendor to charge less and they will get more profits.

But the world in this argument is far, far away from reality. Here's a more realistic example:

This more scenario starts the same as the last one, but it's more complex as it's grounded in reality.

Guy A undercuts guy B's prices, but this time he's greedy and instead of taking that 10% out of the profit he takes it out of his employees' salaries. 

At first some of his employees leave for guy B's company, but after some time guy B's company fails due to the lack of customers and they end up crawling back to his now larger store.  

Now A-mart (as I'll call it from now on) is growing and needs employees, and at the moment it is the only place that will hire most people. It becomes a franchise and opens locations all over the country. 

Its routine in each new town it arrives in is: open a large new store > hire a bunch of employees > undercut local businesses' prices > now they're the only grocery store to buy from and work for > customers are stuck supporting an unethical business and the employees have nowhere else to work.

Now that they're the only store around, they can adjust their prices so that whenever there isn't competition they raise their prices, and whenever there is they undercut them, causing them to fail.

Free market won't save you if there's a huge corporation whose prices are impossible to beat because of their predatory business model.

The government won't help either. Since A-mart is such a huge business, they now have hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in lobbying. They bribe politicians into letting them keep their monopoly which thrives off everything an ethical company isn't.

And then there's the whole issue of monopolizing life-saving drugs and procedures that there aren't any generic alternatives for, but that deserves a post of its own.

**tl;dr: the "if there's a bad business free market will make sure that a better one will beat it" argument is foolish, naive, and doesn't account for factors such as lobbying, paying employees less than they deserve, and predatory pricing to stamp out competition**
gpt
Lobbying, paying employees less than they deserve, predatory pricing. OK let's look at these in turn.

Lobbying. That's not capitalism. Once the government is involved, by definition it's no longer a free market. Beseeching the government to regulate (code for "rig") the market you have a state controlled market not a free market. 

Paying employees less than they deserve. Wfat does that mean? If a Wal-Mart employee is paid 12 dollars an hour, is that less than they deserve? If so what is the right amount, and how did you determine that? If Deontay Wilder gets paid 15 million dollars for a big fight, is that more than he deserves? You get paid what you are worth. Simple as that. 

Predatory pricing. Oh scary words. "Predatory" pricing. Not "low prices" not "competitive prices" but predatory prices. Does the winner eat the loser? No. It's called being competitive and trying to attract customers. "Predatory" pricing is a nonsense term it doesn't even make sense.