re: #70 iossarian

How can this be? I thought the captains of industry worked their mighty works DESPITE the government’s evil intervention!

Heh. The cruelest way to look at the current economic set up is that you have the first world, the consumers, where the government has ensured that a free and open society exists that enables wealth to be (though this is rapidly becoming untrue) spread out amongst the largest possible number of consumers. These consumers can purchase products made by the repressed populations in areas like India, China, Thailand, etc. where the governments are strong enough to quell worker discontent and ensure that the products are made cheaply and ‘efficiently’.

So we have a set of consumers, a set of producers, and those who profit from it in the main are the owners of the capital.

This is a massively simplistic analysis that leaves out a hell of a lot, but one thing is true: There are no major industries in any countries that don’t have strong central governments. At most, there is resource extraction. But in order to have a real economy, you have to have a strong central government.