Aha, finally a cogent and damning critique of the natural progression of Capitalism!

I keep running into people who want to say that the problem is individual liberty, or that we need to switch to some alternative source of value, or that the problem is liberalism but liberalism isn't even about individual liberty but rather about allowing rapacious corporations to run rampant and therefore we should throw out everything.

It is very frustrating, because Captialism has huge problems, and none of the above are it. Indeed, if you think those are it, you'll almost surely make it worse.

But your analysis looks pretty on-target to me. I hope you come up with a tentative proposal for how to use this realization of (some of) the actual problems to approach a solution, or at least slow the descent into dystopia.

(Note: because of how leverage works and what the market values, slurpers are even empowered to buy up less-slurpy corporations that are far beyond their ability to afford directly but not far beyond their capacity to finance.)

(Second note: assuming that people are economically "rational" (i.e. act like a perfect corporation maximizing self-value at the expense of all else) has been a huge bane of economics, and corporations, optimized for exploitation like they are, have been quick to use the disparity between actual and "rational" behavior to slurp up more (c.f. why does everything cost $1.99?). But I strongly suspect that this also can form a large part of the solution when wielded against rather than by the corporations. Nothing solid enough to propose, yet, though.)