Capitalism - Good or bad ?

[ProgressiveEconomist]

92. IMO, vigorously regulated small business capitalism, with a large government sector for

providing education, healthcare, infrastructure, and safety nets, provides the best possible democratic society. Nobody gets very rich from such capitalism, because all long-run profits get competed away by free entry of other businesses. And government regulation protects society from fraud, pollution, unsafe products, and whatever else unscrupulous ingenuity would try to get away with.

But IMO the arch enemy of democratic society is BIG business. Big BUSINESS MUST try to corrupt government, because only government can protect big business from having long-run profits competed away by new entrants into their industries.

Think of the worst of the worst big businesses. The planet-destroying oil industry depends on corrupt government leasing of public lands and oceans for drilling. Pharmaceutical companies get patent monopolies for drugs that attack alleged diseases and conditions like erectile dysfunction and anxiety rather than the world's greatest killers such as sleeping sickness. Communications giants like the pirate Comcast buy up public airwaves on the cheap. Unsafe mining operations get government approval for mountaintop removal and dumping millions of tons of toxic waste into streams and watersheds. Gas companies got GW Bush to give them complete EXEMPTION from environmental laws so they could destroy millions of acres of groundwater with "fracking". Financial institutions got essentially self-regulation under GW Bush's SEC chairman and ramped up leverage to unsafe 40X levels from relativeky safe 10X levels under Clinton.

All of this would be impossible without tens of thousands of big-business lobbyists and trade associations whose job it is to corrupt politicians with "campaign" bribes and threats to support primary election opponents if they don't get "quos" for their "quids".