> When I see a system that combines externalities, wild inequality of outcome and this sort of builtin restistance to tackling the cons, my facile knee jerk reaction is to assume that it is rigged.
But that's just the brain's bias towards simple explanations and well-defined actors - the Ockham's Razor heuristic you could call it. Truth is we're still in the early stages of capitalism where most (all?) nations aren't stably resourced and as such geopolitical strategy and internal unrest can and will undo capital expansion with a stroke of the pen or a bullet from a gun. The need for monopolisable extractative resources such as fossil fuels ensures that capital will trend towards monopolistic behemoths with deep connections to their governments, and that permeates down into capital as a whole.
Moving to a more decentralised model of resourcing means less need for national security to favour and support massive quasi-governmental corporations that are "too vital to fail" and which leads to an environment where the inevitable endpoint of every market sector is consolidation into their own behemoth conglomerates. The more dispersed your resource acquisition is, the less dependent on massive corporations governments will be.
But that's just the brain's bias towards simple explanations and well-defined actors - the Ockham's Razor heuristic you could call it. Truth is we're still in the early stages of capitalism where most (all?) nations aren't stably resourced and as such geopolitical strategy and internal unrest can and will undo capital expansion with a stroke of the pen or a bullet from a gun. The need for monopolisable extractative resources such as fossil fuels ensures that capital will trend towards monopolistic behemoths with deep connections to their governments, and that permeates down into capital as a whole.
Moving to a more decentralised model of resourcing means less need for national security to favour and support massive quasi-governmental corporations that are "too vital to fail" and which leads to an environment where the inevitable endpoint of every market sector is consolidation into their own behemoth conglomerates. The more dispersed your resource acquisition is, the less dependent on massive corporations governments will be.