How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism? By Jeffrey A. Tucker

Alliances between large corporations and governments always comes to a bad end. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:

n the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them. 

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. 

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. 

Here is Google’s new headquarters in Reston, Virginia. 

And here is Amazon’s, in Arlington, Virginia. 

Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too. 

Continue reading