Penny wise and pound foolish

Why are people such financial retards?
They can't handle wasting +20% price on vegetables but easily rack up late fees. And they don't listen to me.

>>24

But I am talking about how a small business can operate in a sustainable and fair fashion

Capitalism always inevitably leads to small business dying out because large-scale capital has loads of advantages over small players. Bribing officials is just one of them, with some others being: having access to financial markets, getting cheaper loans from banks, being able to engage in price dumping to weed out competition, having more money to devote to R&D, having more money to enter new markets (and any other activities with high entry costs like buying up patents), being "too big to fail" (bailed out by government), having better lawyers etc. Capitalism always leads to consolidation of capital, cartelization and destruction of small businesses because having lots of money is a positive feedback system.

So if your company is as good as you're saying, you probably will have it bought off your hands and the new owners will have no incentive to "do their best" and lower prices. You can check out this story for an extreme real-world case of that http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/martin-shkreli-responds-to-sydney-schoolboys-who-recreated-drug-in-daraprim/news-story/478b698ff20623d0e1efcbbf3c817b66?nk=990891ebeecbd7fc1a00e2c555f178be-1480777608

Former hedge fund manager Mr Shkreli was labelled a “morally bankrupt sociopath” and “the most hated man in America” after his company bought the rights to Daraprim last year and then raised the price in the US from $US13.50 a tablet to $US750.

I'm not saying capitalism is evil, I'm saying it has different stages of developments kind of like the human body. Nice, beautiful and full of possibilities when young, and dilapidated and smelly when old. There's a time and place for everything, including revolutions against capitalism when it starts to wreak.

Again, you're too naive here:

So capitalism can be a tool that forces one to raise their standards to best their competition

Capitalism also has properties that work to hinder competition. Like when competitors watch the leader and always copycat it so no one can get ahead, so there's no reason to innovate at all because following the leader is cheaper. Chinese like to do that a lot which is why Chinese goods have a reputation of being fakes but often high quality fakes; what's the point of buing an authentic product made on American soil if you can buy Chinese look-alikes from dozens of producers which are pretty much as good and cost a fraction? So then the capitalists start thinking "what's the point of competition if you can't make money off of it no matter how hard you work", and start thinking of ways to reduce competition and be kings of the hill where there will be as few competitors as possible. This is why you have Apple with their incredibly restricted, closed OS that you can't freely install third-party software on. This is why you have a system of patents with people patenting the shit out of every trivial thing they can. This is why you have companies creating demand rather than serving it, like the pharmaceuticals did with that chicken flu or whatever. The truth is, capitalism is often a contest of wits and cheats rather than of honest workers trying to make the quality of their products better. This has nothing to do with Judaism or "money hoarding" (which isn't a bad thing anyway because you might need that money for when a loved one gets ill or when you get old), this is just a fact of life as human industries are diverse and not all of them encourage honest competition.

People hunger for something more virtuous and meaningful than what they see around them.

No, they don't. People hunger to have their bread and their shows, that's all. This was known in times of Ancient Rome, and this is amply demonstrated by the modern consumerist First-World societies. Hell, if you really read up on the ancient literature like Beowulf and take note of every time the discourse is about food, you would be appalled how important being well-fed was to the ancient, supposedly more spiritual and virtue-oriented societies. Cattle was culled to greet ambassadors (the more important the ambassadors, the more cattle), to send the dead on their way (because OMG what are their spirits going to eat on the way to the spirit world?!?), wars were started over bad food, provinces paid taxes in food, feudal lords let their own armies ravage their own counties to get food etc. Lots of blood has been spilled over things like salt and spice. Not to mention the obligatory harvest rituals, sacrifices against drought and famine and so on. Thus, even in the more spiritual and moral times, when people cared more about honor and reputation than cars and smartphones, what most people really cared about was feeding themselves and their families. It's no wonder then that, once the hunger is satisfied, most humans find that they don't really care much about anything. This actually explains most of the modern valueless, virtueless, inane and immoral Western society. What it doesn't explain is that the idle mind and body (the Devil's playground, as they say) starts developing various unhealthy diseases that were unheard of in the ancient, hungry times when people had to streamline their lives to get by. There probably weren't many weak fatsters in a barbarian army - likewise there probably weren't many people with depression and loneliness and anorexia and similar bullshit. When you gotta really work to get food, you don't have time to get fat or depressed. This explains the

immigrants from places like rural Ghana, they will say that people are happier there than they see in the West

part.

So if I had to use actual historical evidence to judge about human nature, I'd say that what most humans want first and foremost is to be well-fed. But if they're too well-fed for too long, they start to get diseases because there must be a balance to everything. This is paralleled in the First World societies, by the way: when you're too rich for too long, your country starts to decay because there's too many old people, too few young, and no one has the virtue to stand up for your values anymore, which makes the country ripe for invasion from the outside. It's just the natural cyclic way, nothing lasts forever and everything gets old and dies at some point.

>>25
The start of his post is correct, but most of the rest is baloney.