Amazon's regulation often means sellers are blocked from selling the same items at a lower price elsewhere.

To steal Benn Jordan’s ideas, capitalism is replacing itself with leveragism.

You don’t buy things from Amazon because they’re the best store with the best prices, you buy them because they’re the only store that has their own massive scale delivery service that delivers more packages than FedEx or UPS (not combined, but Amazon still delivers more packages than either).

It’s not possible for another store to compete with that. There is no competition. Starting a competitor to Amazon would be more difficult and capital intensive than starting a new car or rocket company.

There is no other store that can get me the most obscure and random stuff in less than 24 hours. Walmart can’t do it, Costco can’t do it, Target can’t do it, Dollar General can’t do it.

I like your optimism. It reminded me of a joke from communist Czechoslovakia. There is a guy in 1930s owning a coal mine, and he gets a prediction, that the mine "will be taken and have a poet as a new owner" (a reference to 1948 communist coup and communist slogans put on factories). And the guy says, "That's ridiculous! The mine is a hole in the ground. How could anybody take it from me? But sure, if the poet saves enough money, he can buy it!"

> because capitalism means competition.

I think you’re confusing a system of private ownership of capital (capitalism) with free markets.

This is not capitalism, it’s tech feudalism

What competition?

Anticompetitive behavior is one of the most predictable failure modes of capitalism. Capitalism only works if you have measures in place that protect fair competition and those measures are actually used.