Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.
I think the great problem of our time is that the challenges get easier to solve every day but we mostly spend our time making rent.  And not the kind of rent mentioned in the article - just plain old fashioned too-much-month-not-enough-money kind of rent.  When we’re desperate, we grovel and do whatever work we need to to survive.  This is akin to how researchers spend inordinate amounts of time applying for grants rather than, you know, saving the world and all that.  This is because any free capital in the economy gets vacuumed up by a few large players who only divvy it out through &quot;sanctioned&quot; channels that most people no longer have access to.<p>In the olden days, the main force balancing this was taxation.  Even if you look at it as a purely zero-sum game, any money paid by the very wealthy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the masses.  This didn&#x27;t sit right with the very wealthy and they rigged the system to such a degree that I&#x27;ve never seen an appreciable tax increase in my lifetime, even in the face of trillion dollar deficits and the loss of the middle class in the US.  Mathematically, trickle-down economics has given us just exactly the system it was designed to.  I mourn for the millions (billions) of people left out, but for whatever reason a lot of people don’t even see them.<p>Maybe the great problem of our time is ignorance..