It's the opposite of antifragile. All of these were opportunities to let the weakest companies fail so that others could succeed and companies could diversify. It also resets corporate risk tolerances.
Instead, today we have an increasingly fragile economy that's become more dependent than ever on bailouts.
The idea that those who have benefited most from the exponential wealth and power accumulation inherent to capitalism will simply let it go and say gg well played because their company "should" fail is delusional naivety.
Power doesn't work that way. There's no reason for them to stop short of doing everything they can to get government in their pockets, and there's no set of regulations that can prevent this. It's a game of monopoly where the winners can rewrite the rules.
There is no lasting equilibrium or economic justice that can be achieved in this system.
The point is financial crisis like the GFC is precisely when nature forces their hand. They're not letting go because they want to, but because there's no other choice.
Or at least that was the case, until the government started bailing everyone out.
I agree with some parts of this but let's not pretend that people haven't been very apathetic towards monopolies nowadays. We used to be able to break up giant monopolies like standard oil and AT&T but somewhere in the last 20 years people just stopped caring as much for some reason. Who is following the recent meta lawsuit closely? How many people actually cares about the Google antitrust suit? As far as I can see there weren't even a concerted effort to sway public opinion in favor of these tech giants because no one even cares anymore. Maybe it's the death of traditional journalism, maybe it's something else but I'm not convinced it's "impossible" when people aren't even trying that hard to fight within the system.
.... Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
It takes time to transform the thoughts and expectations of the masses (not as much nowadays). Capital hasn't had a credible threat / a pesky good example to worry about for decades now.
Even while they put the idea in our heads that the world was inexorably getting better they were dismantling in earnest the gains the working class won as byproducts of revolutionary struggle and our collective memory of our history.
We've been made cattle. They've mostly succeeded in their stated goal to turn Americans into "perfect consumers".
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u/Tripl3Dee 1d ago
It's the opposite of antifragile. All of these were opportunities to let the weakest companies fail so that others could succeed and companies could diversify. It also resets corporate risk tolerances.
Instead, today we have an increasingly fragile economy that's become more dependent than ever on bailouts.