Is capitalism a threat to democracy?

I don't know of any nice rankings on these things but I also can't see why it should be the case. If you have the monopoly of violence you can tell a company to do X and if they don't you can punish them.

Of course it depends on the size of your population/market, if you are small, a company can just leave the country rather then comply. However that is equally true for a small country with powerful government.

That is just old marxist economics that has been disproven. Economists agree that markets do not automatically lead to oligopoly.

This is why Marx has no credibilty in economics. All his predictions turned out to be false not because 'economists are the hand maidens of capital' as leftist like to claim.

In fact Marx economics was very popular amoung economist at one point, it was then deconstructed theortically and disproven by evidence.

I agree we should not claim that.

I would just say that the people who pushed thought about capitlaism, like Adam Smith, David Hume, F.A. Hayek and others, spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the system resistant against that cooruption.

There are whole fields in economics that try to analyse how these cooruptions and problems come about and how we could lessen their impact.

The important thing to note is that this is difficult and having a government with less overall power and scope is easier to manage because their is less insentive to capture it.

It's not at all an academic argument but a critical issue being resolved right now; the preference for capitalism over democracy is openly argued and put into practice:

* You may recall Peter Thiel's argument that democracy and "freedom" (i.e., his freedom to act as a capitalist) are incompatible, and therefore we should limit the former. Thiel is close to the U.S. president, and his people are advisors in the White House and other branches.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

* Also, the recent U.S. Secretary of State, as well as other members of the administration, openly said the U.S.'s foreign policy should prioritize "economic interests" over democracy and human rights.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tillerson-pushing-human-righ...

* Finally, as much as HN doesn't like to discuss this issue, we also can't bury our heads in the sand: The nationalist and racist politics in the U.S. are also anti-democracy,[0] and by devaluing democracy they open the door to capitalism-over-democracy. Probably not coincidentally, the nationalists and the capitalism-over-democracy people (like Thiel and Tillerson; let's call them oligarchs) ally in the coalition that supports Trump and the GOP. For example, the GOP actively works the limit voting, the foundation of democracy, by people they don't like.

That coalition, of the nationalists/racists and the oligarchs, are a threat to democracy in the U.S. (and probably elsewhere). It's only an anecdote, but a wealthy person whom I had respected intellectually told me, 'I voted for Trump and I'd vote for him again - I'm a businessperson and business is good'. Their argument is implicitly framed around the idea that capitalism is all that matters.

And I'll add that it's very short-sighted: You only need to look around the world and see that democracy breeds economic prosperity like nothing else in the history of humanity. The democracies are all the wealthiest countries in the world; the corrupt oligarchies are all poorer, and had been for millennia before democracy. In fact, the wealth of corrupt oligarchies today comes from selling to wealthy democrats and profiting on the peaceful international order and world trade established by the democrats. The world of corrupt oligarchies (and monarchies, etc.), before democracy, was poorer by orders of magnitude.

...

[0] Why are nationalism and racism anti-democracy? The necessary foundation of democracy is universal human rights; for example the founders of the United States made it the basis of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights ... That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men". On a practical basis, if the other person doesn't have rights then neither do you; if it's ok for someone to take away their vote then why shouldn't they take away yours? Nationalism and racism say that rights are not universal at all, but that they depend on nationality and race.

It's a religion :(