Honestly how? What law could be written that would ban PE firms and lookalike businesses that would hold up to scrutiny.
No one with a brain likes what PE does, but really, what do they do that's illegal as opposed to people finally realizing that capitalism is essentially evil?
PE depends on favorable tax loopholes and a lot of acquisitions depend on them being able to do things like buying a company with a ton of loans which they then saddle the acquired company with or stripping assets before going bankrupt. All of that depends on arbitrary legal structures and protections which could be rebalanced to favor more productive business models.
Right. Either you directly regulate activity, or you adjust incentives. If you suggest one, detractors say you can't do that, you have to do the other thing, and then work as hard as possible to block your efforts to do the very thing they suggested you do. That's because they don't want things to change at all. But that's obviously not an option, so I tend to suggest trying both and seeing what sticks.
what gets me is trying to make the argument that market economies are not necessarily capitalist economies. it seems plain over time that capitalism works to destroy markets. As an American I'm pretty pro market, but that means at this point I'm an enemy of capitalism.
It doesn't help that the people who say that prove an understanding of capitalism is about as thin as a single layer of varnish and their collective ideas for workable alterations would fit on a single index card after it was already ripped up by hand.
Painfully true and somehow it's everywhere on this forum. To these people, capitalism and markets and money are all the same thing, and the only finite resources in the universe are those whose distribution is gatekept by the evil, evil capitalist overlords.
Everybody's experience is different. I've found experientially that anybody who can actually define and describe these things with any degree of seriousness is, at least, aware of the resource constraints that make up the real world and have opinions that at least run in approximate sync with reality, which definitionally excludes them espousing real Redditor crap. I'm willing to engage with anti-capitalists who have at least put in the work to understand capitalism, but it seems like there's not much overlap between "understands" and "disagrees" for that segment.
No, and in case you stopped reading partway into my comment, this type of useless gotcha counts under Redditor crap. I don't think it's controversial that understanding something is a pathway to criticizing it appropriately. The average anti-capitalist cannot begin to describe exactly what it is they hate, which is in my opinion one of the defining valuable features of capitalism - that many people can benefit from it without understanding it one lick, and can in fact ineffectually hate it while benefiting from it.
This is the website of a bunch of rich capitalists who got rich by doing capitalism. Of course you can't call the owners of the website evil on that website.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_leverage_points