> So what happened? Capitalism happened. More specifically, financialization happened. Everything US companies does comes down to simply cutting costs and incre

> So what happened? Capitalism happened. More specifically, financialization happened. Everything US companies does comes down to simply cutting costs and increasing profits for short-term financial performance. There is (now) absolutely no long term thinking. Blaming real-world problems on nominalized abstractions is quite unhelpful, especially when those abstractions are all-encompassing ones like "capitalism" or "financialization" which mostly represent patterns of behavior that have always been present. Identifying specific shifts in incentives or intentions that resulted in different motivations or intentions becoming dominant is difficult, but there's really little point in engaging these conversations without at least making an attempt to do so. > As for the author, I suspect he represents the American corporate view that any kind of government intervention (beyond bail outs) cannot work because they don't want that long term. It would reduce profits and/or make a few people slightly less wealthy. They spend a lot of money on propaganda to convince ordinary people that corporatism is good and collectivisim of any kind is bad, that governments aren't capable of anything, etc. "Corporatism" is collectivism, and much of the critique of these kinds of interventions stems from the correct recognition that political incentives (a) are deeply entwined with commercial ones, not a counterbalance to them, and (b) often have even worse failure modalities than prevailing economic incentives.