The rich don't give a shit. They're comfortable in their position. It's the uppity doctors, lawyers, techies, and everyone else with an office job that need to feel like they're better than the plumber, line cook and brick layer.
Every idiot who lives in a good school district with manicured lawns and reads the nutrition facts on the frozen dinner they're buying at Target thinks they're saving the world by telling the politicians to ban fireworks and menthols.
Yeah I know that's a broad brush, don't care.
I don’t get why you say this. Almost everyone has a need to feel like a good person, justified, etc, and the easiest way for someone with a several hundred million plus net worth to feel that way is to believe that they earned it, are special and that normal people are too stupid to do the same thing. There’s lots of other options for justifications but none of them are particularly flattering to the have-nots.
Not all, just some of them. It's pretty obvious which ones when you actually look at how they design and market their products.
It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who Peter Theil is when you buy a pizza. It matters that he somehow makes money from that pizza and if he can, he will extract more value than the pizza guy.
I mean, companies optimise for profits and at some point people fall for it in excess which is the point OP made.
It kinda makes sense, because the means the companies employ are psychologically advanced plays on people who don't know the spelling of psychology.
I'm probably manipulated into scrolling more than I wanted to or buying more than I wanted to on an everyday basis.
Yes, of course they are. Left unregulated they will form cartels. As Adam Smith said, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
They will try to raise barriers to entry as well, to limit competition. They will try to increase sales by many means.
They may be ethical enough not to do all that, but the potential is definitely there.
If anything, cartels thrive under heavily regulated and dirigiste economic systems, where as in an unregulated market a cartel would eventually lose to a competitor or succumb to infighting.
