It’s unregulated capitalism at least, or perhaps capitalism regulated by the capitalists. We’re entering uncharted ground in terms of not only wealth distributi

It’s unregulated capitalism at least, or perhaps capitalism regulated by the capitalists. We’re entering uncharted ground in terms of not only wealth distribution but also corporate ownership. We’ve never had a period in time where massive corporations owned basically every part of everything the way companies like Amazon does for physical goods and more, or the way Microsoft does for digital goods and more, or the way Google does for advertising and more, or the way Disney does for entertainment and more. I know there are other major corporations than those, but it’s not like you can really do a small scale business and compete with these massive corporations without either being bought up or having your product “copy-pasted” and sold at a low enough price until you go bankrupt. Regulations are meant to prevent monopolies, but that has simply failed. Legislation is meant to distribute wealth, at least to some degree, but in the past 50 years the top earners have gone from paying almost 80% taxes to almost 0% taxes. So while you’re right that this is what capitalism looks like, capitalism was just never maintainable without regulations and that part isn’t exactly new. It eventually leads to civil war and break downs of society, every time, except this time we’re fast approaching a world where the aristocracy will not really need a massive work force because AI and machinery will be capable of performing most tasks. In many ways it’s basically the worst version of the cyberpunk we all read back in the 80/90ies come true. But the catch is that no other system works either and unless we manage to steer things back to regulated capitalism then the nationstate as we’ve known it for around 400 years is basically going to be replaced by something else. At least here in the west, China probably has it covered by their extreme version of regulated capitalism, but even they have massive economical issues because they cheated capitalism by making up things like house ownership. There is a fairly clear path out of it of course. Especially housing. We simply need to get our governments to take ownership over all housing that is owned by equity fonds and give zero fucks about the massive economic impact that will have on the aristocracy. Our society and our economies as such can survive it, and it’ll be better than the crash that eventually happens when nobody can afford these houses. Which is sort of a weird thing for me to say, considering part of the investment bank I work for is into bricks, but even now we’re operating at an intended loss with 10.000 homes (which is a lot in my country) being empty because it’s too hard to increase rent once a home is rented out and our business prefers to keep them empty and hope for a better economy to rent them out at higher markups. Partly because the entire projects were financed with the assumption that the rent would never be below a certain rate, and it will be more expensive to actually earn money than to lose them, at least in the short time, but the short term is 7 years.