The end of capitalism has begun (2015)
I think the core premise of this article is flawed.<p>The trend we&#x27;ve actually seen is increasingly socialized risk.  This applies to all areas of the economy, from the artificial demand for high risk mortgages to the allowance of a bank&#x27;s arbitrary assets to be used as risk capital.<p>Also, congress has gutted the PBGC to the point where it is far from being actuarially sound.  Social security and medicare are budgeted such that cuts are guaranteed, etc.<p>None of these are capitalist enterprises whatsoever.  They are state-run markets with various ministers and officials dictating the prices and claiming to understand supply and demand better than markets, and allocating &quot;welfare&quot; to various interest groups (individuals and firms).<p>Note that nearly all justifications for the overreach in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were welfare oriented.  Prices stopped being an indication of supply and demand but were considered &quot;good&quot; or &quot;bad&quot; and government was called upon to help make prices &quot;more good&quot;.  This is profoundly dangerous, and has had significant consequences.<p>More recently, the ACA was passed which codified a massive redistribution of wealth from young to old.<p>The trends we&#x27;re seeing emerge are things like credit being a right rather than a function of supply and demand for risk capital.<p>So soon we&#x27;ll find that a job is a right, credit is a right, healthcare is a right, etc.  The tough question about healthcare is not whether we should care for the sick and indigent, but what are the proper incentives for a healthcare system to have.  Rather than addressing the real questions we got a simple wealth redistribution from young to old and from consumers to incumbent firms, an emerging class of Halliburtons of healthcare.<p>Both political parties lack any desire to exist in a capitalist society; both would rather make big promises and undertake massive projects that have no counterfactual data with which to judge their success or failure.<p>Trump has promised to continue the work done by Clinton and Bush and Obama to remove regulatory barriers to risk aggregation, which appeals strongly to firms now that we all know that regardless of whatever (arbitrary) underwriting requirements the law sets, the government will underwrite any losses that could result in insolvency. Employees of those firms stand to collect performance bonuses each quarter until the firm turns out (oops) to be over-leveraged.<p>The nice thing about socialism is that it is a simple ideology of preventing class power from emerging. What we have in the US today is a highly corrupt form of crony capitalism and public&#x2F;private schemes designed to enrich specific firms and cronies.  That there still exists any rhetoric that talks about capitalism, individualism, etc., is simply due to some politicians finding it useful to rally a small number of constituents, but it means nothing and has zero impact, other than to fuel articles like this that disparage it.