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The Rise and Dangerous Deceptions of New Capitalism

This 1952 cartoon told a neat story, later canonized in MAGA lore as an example of “when America was great.” 

A small business becomes a corporation, sells shares in a so-called “free market,” and prospers under the watchful eyes of bankers and the SEC. Capitalism was portrayed as transparent, democratic, and fair, with prosperity as the reward for virtue and compliance, untouched by significant intervention or corruption.

The reality was very different. 

During World War II, the United States had massively intervened in the market with the socialized production of the War Production Board, creating unprecedented stability and building the largest middle class in history (sans minorities). Those policies even turned Coca-Cola into the world’s first global brand. 

In the early Cold War, high taxes, strong unions, tight regulations, and social programs like the GI Bill weren’t just moral or ideological choices; they were strategic. These policies were designed to contain labor unrest, curb inequality, and prove that capitalism could deliver prosperity more broadly than communism. And they worked: Under these constraints, American corporations built infrastructure, drove innovation, and fueled decades of growth.

Since the mid-1960s, however, this model has been slowly dismantled. A fantasy of “pure capitalism” rose in its place — the myth that lower taxes, deregulation, and unfettered markets organically produce prosperity. 

History tells another story: Markets concentrate competition, monopolies capture regulators, and capitalism relies on government. The “free market” rests on the very power it vilifies.

What remains today is just an illusion of prosperity, masking a system where accountability, welfare, and democracy all give way to profit.

Six Modern Systemic Realities

1. Corporate Obfuscation & Regulatory Arbitrage

Many, if not most, corporations are now built to avoid scrutiny. Through tax havens, shell firms, and jurisdictional arbitrage, they shift profits, hide liabilities, and exploit legal gaps. Capital evades regulation while still draining public infrastructure, subsidies, and labor.

2. Systemic Fraud & Legal Evasion

Regulation has become weak by design. Fraud, faked earnings, hidden debts, and manipulated disclosures are routine. Agencies like the SEC and DOJ are underfunded or captured. Most cases end in settlements with no admission of guilt and fines far smaller than the misbegotten gains supposedly being punished. 

Increasingly, this takes the form of Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) and Non-Prosecution Agreements (NPAs) — legal mechanisms that delay or avoid charges if minimal conditions are met. The point is secrecy and the guarantee that nobody goes to jail, achieved by weaponizing delay, cost, and risk until enforcement collapses.

3. Executive Compensation Detached From Performance

Modern executive compensation is often decoupled from long-term company health. Incentives are tied to short-term share price increases, driven as often by layoffs, stock buybacks, and financial engineering as by innovation or sustainability. Executives are often rewarded even when overall firm value, employee welfare, and environmental outcomes decline.

4. Commodification of Ethical & Social Costs

Profit-driven corporate activity today is primarily framed as beneficial. In practice, however, modern capitalism often reduces adverse ethical and social impacts to minor variables in economic models. Labor exploitation, environmental harm, and public health crises are assessed through cost-benefit analysis, legal risk, and reputational exposure — absorbed as routine cost-of-doing-business expenses rather than recognized as violations of the social contract that underpins social and political stability.

5. The Illusion of a Free Market

Free-market self-sufficiency is largely a fallacy. Many major industries survive only through perpetual  state support and legal protection. 

Agriculture shows this clearly: Without subsidies, price supports, and crop insurance the sector would collapse. Once the real costs of land degradation, water, labor, energy, and transport are counted, food production is far more expensive than market prices suggest. Government funding covers the gap, sustaining the illusion of a functional market. 

The same dynamic props up fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, and tech — all reliant on public money, infrastructure, and legal protections.

The “free market” runs on public money, as most clearly illustrated in four sectors.

• Agro: The US government spends about $30 billion per year on direct farm subsidies (USDA data).
• Petro: The IMF estimated total global fossil fuel subsidies (explicit and implicit) at $7 trillion in 2023.
• Pharma: Estimated $45 billion a year in NIH research plus billions from Medicare, Medicaid, and tax credits. Shielded from lawsuits by the Vaccine Act and 2005 PREP Act, with patents granting long-monopoly pricing. DPAs/NPAs are routine.
• Tech: Over $150 billion a year in federal research, DARPA-created internet, GPS ($12 billion to build, $2 billion/year to run), and the $36 billion CHIPS Act — all private firms profiting from state-funded infrastructure.

6. Fractional Reserve Banking & Debt Expansion

Banks create credit far beyond their deposits, expanding the money supply and inflating asset bubbles. This fuels short-term growth but concentrates systemic risk. 

When crashes come, profits stay private while losses are shifted to the public through bailouts and unemployment, as seen in the 2008 financial crisis.

Systemic Convergence

Flint, MI, showed what happens when corporate power feeds on public subsidy and then abandons the very people who sustained it. Ford Motor Company drained the city with decades of tax breaks, then walked away, leaving behind poverty, decay, and a poisoned water system. Flint became the starkest symbol of how the “free market” extracts value, externalizes cost, and leaves ordinary citizens to bear the wreckage.

Taken together, these features reveal an economic order fundamentally misaligned with the public narrative maintained by that old cartoon and modern PR. This system is not rules-based or self-correcting. It concentrates wealth, shifts risk to the public, and buries costs in complexity.

History proves the pattern. The Great Depression, Enron, the 2008 crisis, the opioid epidemic, Monsanto, Boeing: In case after case, profit-hungry corporations and regulatory failure caused mass harm with minimal accountability, and continue to do so. 

What we face now is a more evolved and dangerous stage: totalitarian free-market capitalism, soon to be supercharged by AI. In this model, the state no longer even tacitly restrains corporate power; it actively advances it. Regulators are captured or gutted, courts grant impunity, and policy serves capital.

China does this openly, pairing market expansion with state power. Russia follows a similar path, where oligarchs and political elites operate as one system. The West now does it behind democratic facades, using regulation, courts, and media to disguise the same fusion of state and capital.

Trump as Personification

This convergence is personified in Donald Trump. He is no outsider draining a swamp. He is the swamp made flesh, the purest product of a system built on fraud and evasion. 

His business empire stood on bankruptcy shields, legal opacity, and mountains of debt. He habitually stiffed contractors and vendors, daring them to chase him through endless litigation for partial payments. He weaponized settlements, NDAs, and insider ties — wielding delay, cost, and reputation until accountability collapsed.

In office, he simply institutionalized, even nationalized, the same playbook: stripping regulations, dismantling protections, showering allies with tax cuts, and fusing state power to private capital, while taking his cut of the proceeds. 

Knowing that corporations care less about democracy than about stability and profit, he offered both in exchange for publicly displayed fealty.

Trump does not diverge from unchecked capitalism’s trajectory; he perfects it. He is the American face of the same authoritarian-corporate convergence championed in China and Russia. He fronts as an outsider while enacting the oldest insider code: Enrich the wealthy, silence dissent, erase accountability, and monopolize the narrative.

The Freedom Illusion

The messaging of the 1950s “Great America,” embraced by MAGA, promised a system that worked for the people. What we have now is a machine that feeds on them — and calls it freedom.

Corporations are not reluctant victims of authoritarianism; they enable it. They prefer the guarantees of stability offered by an authoritarian hand that shields them from oversight and secures profit. Trump provides that bargain: deregulation, tax cuts, and impunity in exchange for performances of public loyalty.

Fascism has never opposed capitalism; it thrives on it. Trump is dangerous, but so is the illusion that “free-market” corporate America will save us. In truth, it is building, with Palantir and its ilk, the very authoritarian system it claims to resist. And with each passing day, Trump strengthens that system:

• Purging federal agencies/experts via fabricated “corruption” charges, and installing loyalists;
• Silencing the press with false claims of “fake news” to delegitimize critical journalism;
• Creating an extrajudicial, covert ICE enforcer corps targeting opposition cities, states, and resistors;
• Seizing local policing authority under the pretext of “rampant crime”;
• Weaponizing justice, persecuting critics, while burying evidence like the Epstein files to protect allies.

Related: As His Popularity Tanks, Trump Turns to Power

Each step tightens the grip of authoritarian rule. The only question left is: Where will it end?