Car companies in 1910 would have been real bastions of free enterprise. By 1950 they had massive lobbyists and all the rest.<p>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.<p>The US government and big business have interests that sometimes converge but to say it's all corporatist is overstating it.<p>The US government still engages in anti-trust. Companies would sit there and be really annoyed by various actions taken by the US government.
Start here and work backwards...<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC</a><p>.
I mean, it's not rocket science how it happened. Here's a short PSA from 1946 that breaks it down:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/Despotis1946" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/Despotis1946</a>
presumably, post US Civil War. the "Gilded Age" and all that.<p>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).<p>Or how John Company managed to take over most of India, etc.<p>There is an attempt to create a narrative that this is a new thing, but it's been a thing forever.
<i>Jeffrey Albert Tucker is an American libertarian writer, publisher, entrepreneur and advocate of anarcho-capitalism and Bitcoin. For many years he worked for Ron Paul, the Mises Institute, and Lew Rockwell.</i>
techno-corporatism = capilalism<p>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)<p>Every single issue he describes is due to unregulated capitalism.<p>Once the "market" is eliminated by virtue of one overwhelmingly dominant vendor, who gets to guide the magical invisible hand?
<i>This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. [...]</i><p><i>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.</i><p>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.