How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism?

I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism. 

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The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power. 

Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob. 

Ed Morrissey

The answer is simple: unbridled consolidation. Conservatives preferred laissez-faire policies to anti-trust enforcement, and the Left liked the consolidation of power in industries it could control, especially the tech sector. We started going down this road in the early 1980s, when M&A was all the rage on Wall Street, and have done next to nothing to limit it so as to balance true commerce against the dangers of consolidated economic and political power. And we have paid the price in liberty and in fiscal sanity. 

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