Your example of firms setting up in the desert or wilderness assumes there is some desert or wilderness left to expand into. This is Marx's concepts of the expa

Your example of firms setting up in the desert or wilderness assumes there is some desert or wilderness left to expand into. This is Marx's concepts of the expansion of capital. Marx argues that with nowhere to expand it begins to eat itself. You posit that the situation has a political cause, but I think this is just what happens when a system requiring exponential growth reaches the limits of its bounding box.