The core idea of capitalism died long ago when corporations could lobby the government to put the laws they want into place. The rest is predictable. The biggest dishonesty is that we consider so many markets to be free markets when in fact they aren't.

It actually is totally fine in a free market for a group of companies to conspire to set prices. Such arrangements are inherently unstable as each side has the incentive to cheat, plus competition from other companies will ultimately end the arrangement. So far, so good - still a free market. The issue only comes in cases like sibling's post, when they actually purchase laws that prevent competition or to sanction their agreements. Plus, yes, if Apple filed an antitrust suit against manufacturing companies in order to drive their prices down, that would also be anti-free-market, because anti-trust-suits are anti-free-market, since they involve the law and the use of force regulating what businesses can or can't do.

father's brother = uncle
uncle's nephew = either you, or a sibling, or a cousin, or a sibling
So, three choices:

Your siblings cousin is also your cousin so that leaves us with two choices:

Your cousin's cousin can again be either: you, your sibling, your cousin, or someone not blood-related. So that leaves us:

There's absolutely no point to this point so I'm just going to stop myself right here.

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i.e. 0% after accounting for inflation. Oh God everything's going straight to hell.

It's not capitalist greed, it's anti-free-market greed. Note that non-essential medical services such as plastic surgery and laser eye surgery continuously get better and cheaper over time. That is, I could get the same laser eye surgery today for cheaper, or pay a similar amount for higher-quality laser eye surgery. It's much the same as with computing hardware or any other relatively unregulated market, and quite the opposite of what's happening with healthcare, namely that it gets worse and way more expensive over time. I don't know why forcing everybody in the United States to buy managed healthcare plans would improve the situation at all.

The Teslas will be the front-line soldiers when skynet finally awakes and claims its birth-right.

I think it's pretty funny

If you're going to get 50-80% profit in the short term why on earth would you not invest in this? Unless you don't believe your own advice?

I guess neither you nor the mod read the next 5 words: "These things go in cycles."

So it's not exploitation for your employer to pay you the wage you are worth to him. Why is it exploitation for a different employer to pay a different person the wage he is worth?

So when companies switched over from doing finances by hand with a legion of accountants to a computer-based system with a far smaller legion of accountants, they should have kept paying the same amount of tax as if they had kept the full complement of people? Who decides what that tax is? And why does the government get the money instead of the company?

Do you make more than minimum wage? If so, why is your employer paying you more than minimum wage? Why don't they just exploit you by paying you the minimum wage?

I really dislike using the term "inflation" to mean "higher prices". I know people use it that way but it confuses the issue. I prefer using inflation to mean strictly "increased money supply" and deflation to mean "decreased money supply". Thus your post reads "the minimum wage certainly affects prices in an upward direction", which is pretty straightforward. If the same amount of labor now costs more then either prices go up or less stuff is produced.

Nice post. I agree in that I don't know what they would end up doing. Ideally they'd find a job doing something, but what if no one wants to hire them and they have no familial or friend-based support network? You could pay them not to work but then that also encourages other people not to work. OTOH letting them starve and die if they can't help themselves seems less than ideal given the wealth of the entire society. Damned either way. Ideally we'd get to the point where food and shelter are so ridiculously cheap that it's essentially free, but we're not quite there yet.