At what point do we stop pretending that the west is capitalist and accept that it's some weird corporate-cabal-command-economy? The only thing which might stop this backroom regulatory capture is the EU since they're not in on it.
>Graeber Um…that’s a long story. But one reason seems to be that…and this is why I actually had managerial feudalism in the title, is that the system we have…alright—is essentially not capitalism as it is ordinarily described. The idea that you have a series of small competing firms is basically a fantasy. I mean you know, it’s true of restaurants or something like that. But it’s not true of these large institutions. And it’s not clear that it really could be true of those large institutions. They just don’t operate on that basis.
>Essentially, increasingly profits aren’t coming from either manufacturing or from commerce, but rather from redistribution of resources and rent; rent extraction. And when you have a rent extraction system, it much more resembles feudalism than capitalism as normally described. You want to distribute— You know, if you’re taking a large amount of money and redistributing it, well you want to soak up as much of that as possible in the course of doing so. And that seems to be the way the economy increasingly works.
