To an extent, but at a certain point having a lot of capital doesn’t help as much. Capital buys you economies of scale, it doesn’t buy you innovation, and companies tend to get less efficient as they get larger.

The proper counter to large companies abusing their power, then, is something like Universal Basic Income (or my preferred formation, Negative Income Tax), since one of the biggest obstacles to starting a business is being able to eat while the business is growing. That’s a fantastic thing for the government to provide since it doesn’t interfere much with the market. If we had that, I don’t think nearly as many innovators would join up with big tech companies and instead would start their own ventures.

Another big one is cutting corporate protections with size. The larger you are, the less protection you should need, meaning if you break the law, the law can come after personal assets instead of just corporate assets. We should still provide protections for smaller companies though.

regulatory capture

This isn’t a problem with capitalism, it’s a problem with governments. If we eliminate government entirely (e.g. anarcho-capitcapitalism), there are no regulations, thus no regulatory capture. There are other problems, and that’s where governments should come into play, but they should be as removed from the market as possible to limit the profitability of lobbying.

For example, I’m not happy with the ACA and how it mandates certain minimum coverage, because that encourages companies to meet the bare minimum and profit by hiding as many exclusions as they think they can get away with deep in the agreement. That’s certainly not the intent, but that’s what happens, especially since corporations can lobby to soften language so they can find/create loopholes.

I would prefer one of the following instead:

• public option - private insurance would need to demonstrate value in excess of what Medicare provides in order to compete, which keeps them (more) honest
• hand out cash for customers to pick their own insurance, and merely require contracts to be easily understandable (and the government would take an active role is prosecuting bad agreements)

But no, we got the middleground, which results in a lot of lobbying and cronyism. IMO, governments should instead place themselves in the role of prosecution, letting the courts (and therefore the public) decide on the interpretation of the law through court precedent. Having government agencies set and enforce rules directly opens the door far too widely for cronyism.