Capitalism can't be regulated

>Capitalism needs to be reigned in to stop abuse

I don't believe this is an achievable/realistic goal. The problems that we are seeing in capitalism aren't a result of corruption, abuse, or bad actors. You can certainly find plenty of examples of all of those things and it is certainly worthwhile to combat abuse, but the major flaws of capitalism are natural consequences of taking its organizing principles to their logical conclusion. Capitalism would still produce the same exploitation and conflict even if zero corruption existed.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but when most people say they support capitalism what they mean is they support free market competition and they believe that a bunch of business competing with each other to offer you the best products/services at the best possible price is the most efficient way to utilize scarce resources, as well as being the best way to ensure those scarce resources make it to the people who have the greatest need/demand.

If that is the thing you short, then it might surprise you to learn that Karl Marx, the literal face of communism, would agree with you. Most of the "econ 101" rules that we're taught about markets such as the law of supply and demand are sound economic analysis, so long as certain conditions are met.

One of the most important conditions to meet in order to capitalism to work "as advertised" is that you need markets with an abundance of competition. That is when you see the benefits of markets such as the efficient allocation of scarce resources and being offered better goods at better prices. You don't want to send all of your lumber to the guy who needs to use an entire tree to make one chair, and market competition ensures that the furniture makers who use resources efficiently will be rewarded with more business and the guy who wastes half of the lumber he buys will go out of business.

All of that is well and good, but the problem is that you can't guarantee that a market will have lots of competition, and none of the organizing principles of capitalism incentivize competition. In fact, the market actively discourages competition. Competition is a constraint on a business, forcing them to do things that the business doesn't want to do in order to survive and stay competitive. A business doesn't want to offer their products at low prices, but if they are in competition with other businesses selling similar products then they are forced to provide better quality, better prices, or both in order to stay in business. But since none of these businesses want to sell their products at a lower price if they don't have to, then they are incentivized to cooperate with each other, and do things like set a mutually agreed upon fixed price so that they can stop undercutting each other and both parties profit.

Now, we have laws against practices like price fixing because of public backlash, and we generally refer to that sort of thing as corruption or collusion. But capitalism actively incentivizes that kind of behavior. And since the market has no mechanism for making a value judgement about how a business earns its profits, the market will reward any business with a larger market share for anything that business can get away with in the pursuit of profit.

But even if you can manage to regulate those sorts of behaviors and enforce strict rules about what kinds of things businesses are allowed to do, there is another fatal flaw you will have to address. If you are organizing your economy by passing all matters of economic organization off onto businesses competing on the free market, then on a long enough timescale all of the competition in a given market will tend to disappear. That is the entire point of competition, competitions are used to pick winners and losers. And when you are a business competing on the market, losing that competition means going out of business and the reward for winning is that you get to capture a larger market share and your business will keep growing.

This wasn't as big of a problem in early capitalism, when production was still largely dominated by handicraft production and the barrier to entry for competing in a given market was relatively low, usually just the cost of a few hand tools and some on the job experience. So this threat of competition disappearing wasn't very realistic, since if there was any unmet demand in a given market and sufficiently determined person could pick up a set of tools, get to work, and make a decent living. But when you take the fact that many business ventures fail and are pushed out of the market over time, and combine that with the constant forward march of technology over time, the trend that emerges is wealth and power accumulating into fewer and fewer hands as time goes on. As the state of the art for any given industry incorporates processes that are more and more capital intensive, the barrier to entry for any new businesses to enter that market starts becoming prohibitively higher and higher. Long gone are the days when you could make a living as a seemster with just some needle and thread. And it would be completely unthinkable to try to compete on the market as an automobile manufacturer without first having accesses to hundreds of millions of dollars of start up capital to start building your own factory and start sourcing materials, designs, equipment, talent, and so on.

The idealized free market with an abundance of competition is a relic of the past, that was arguably only viable/beneficial when production was still dominated by handicrafts and artisan work. The industrial Revolution taught us that market competition is not an inherent feature of capitalism, admittance competition was merely a feature of the level of development and conditions of society at that time. With the advent of the steam engine and with the state of the art techniques for most industries rapidly becoming reliant on capital intensive processes such as factory work and the utilization of complex and expensive tools and machinery, we saw a rapid transformation of society and the formation of monopoly domination of several major industries on an astonishingly short timescale. The natural tendency of capitalism is the accumulation of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands, and an economy where our labor is organized by a handful of oligarchs is the inevitable consequence of capitalism.

There is no amount of regulation you could pass that would return us to a time where abundant competition flourished, nor should we want to. If we trust the lessons taught to us by the market, then we should recognize that our society has developed to the point where large scale organization with many people working together is far more efficient than a bunch of small businesses competing with each other. The proof of this is all of the articles written in local newspapers lamenting the fact that when big businesses like Wal-Mart opened up a new location in their community, a dozen or so local small businesses went out of business in the following months because they couldn't compete with the efficiency that Wal-Mart is able to achieve by benefiting from economies of scale.

It would be a mistake to try to solve these problems by trying to break up big companies and hope that competition flourishes just because you might have nostalgia for some idealized version of capitalism that hasn't meaningfully existed for a few centuries at this point. Even if we could recreate the conditions of early capitalism and legislate an abundance of small businesses into existence to compete with each other, doing so would be a step backwards. Small businesses have been disappearing because small scale production is far less efficient than what we are able to achieve with large scale organization given our current level of societal development. Trying to force small businesses into existence wouldn't achieve anything other than making us work less efficiently as a society, meaning that we would be taking on more toil and have less to show for it. And even if you manage to create the political will necessary for the government to take action and break up these companies, since you haven't addressed the conditions that led to that wealth accumulation in the first place then the same problems will end up popping up again. You only end up kicking the can down the road. We can see this from how the trust busting and breaking up of monopolies that happened under Teddy Roosevelt didn't solve the problem of monopolies, and after decades of mergers and buyouts and the continued progression of capital accumulation we now have industrial empires that operate on an even larger scale than the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age, with mega conglomerates that are operating on an international scale instead of limiting themselves to being a national monopoly.

Socialists are often accused of wanting to socialize production and force everyone to work in a big centrally organized economy, but that isn't exactly correct. The truth is that this is already happening under capitalism. Vast segments of our economy are being planned in places like the board room meetings of Amazon and by the planning committees who are tasked with organizing the logistics of these industrial empties. Socialists aren't trying to force centralization on anyone. Centralization is already here. Socialists merely recognize the efficiency that this kind of organization is able to achieve, and don't see any reason why we should reinvent the wheel. The argument that socialists out forward is that there is no justification for these industrial empires to be run by unelected tyrants who are only accountable to their shareholders and whose only justification for pocketing the fruits of our labor is that they have positioned themselves as the gatekeeper between labor and the tools that labor uses.

The core premise of socialism is that all of value created by a business was created by labor, and the workers who invest their labor have every right to demand a democratic workplace so that we can be empowered to make decisions about how the fruits of our labor are allocated, which priorities our labor is used to pursue, and in general to reclaim control over our lives instead of being forced to sell ourselves piecemeal to a capitalist who has no accountability to the members of the public they employ.