It's worth remembering that "libertarian writers" advanced deregulation and climate change denial tropes for decades, and "libertarianism" is itself a billionaire-manufactured and -evangelized sock puppet ideological religion concocted with the help and credibility of Laissez-faire, pro-corporate economists and riding the coattails of a philosophically-bankrupt fiction writer who makes the irrational leap that reality (to a human observer) can ever be a known, unbiased, and concrete certainty.
https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Virtue-of-Stupidity-A-C...
All large industries wind up working with government. The tech companies didn't have them initially because they were not that big. But now that they are huge of course they work with the US government.
The US government and big business have interests that sometimes converge but to say it's all corporatist is overstating it.
The US government still engages in anti-trust. Companies would sit there and be really annoyed by various actions taken by the US government.
Car companies couldn't produce cars between February, 1942 and October, 1945, because the federal government ordered them to produce weapons instead.
There was certainly at least one car company executive that resisted that, he got called a fascist.
Free enterprise was completely suspended. 100%.
That's not really the whole story, lol.
I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
Epoch Times guy is really onto something here. It's crazy that there's no existing body of literature that explores how the ways in which a society's productive forces and relations (its "base", if you will) interacts with its other institutions like government, media, etc. (its "superstructure", if you will). But here we are. He's the lone Cassandra, his desperate cries falling upon deaf ears.
Some reading around this:
Louis Althusser: "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970)
Antonio Gramsci: "Prison Notebooks" (1929-1935)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "The German Ideology" (1845) and "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859)
Honestly it’s astonishing that so few (especially in the US) have an understanding of these points of view and are left reading sources like the Epoch Times to form a view of capitalism that isn’t “I love it, even though I don’t what it is”.
You did much better than me by actually providing some references!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
.
Also the age of actual snake-oil salesmen and literally blowing smoke up your ass. excesses of which are best exemplified by The Jungle, the Pullman Railcar Strike, or the fact that union leader Eugene Debs got ~3% of the US national vote -- the highest ever for a socialist candidate, even now -- while in federal prison (or leading labor riots).
Or how John Company managed to take over most of India, etc.
There is an attempt to create a narrative that this is a new thing, but it's been a thing forever.
It's sort of sadly funny to see the author try to appoligize for a basic tennet of modern US capitalism: make more money at all costs (to others)
Every single issue he describes is due to unregulated capitalism.
Once the "market" is eliminated by virtue of one overwhelmingly dominant vendor, who gets to guide the magical invisible hand?
