Oh, quelle surprise! Rich, powerful industrial managers and financiers take advantage of a vacuum in political power and seize control of productive state assets. I guess they didn't read their Ayn Rand did they? Maybe the Libertarians of the world can send them a stern letter and remind them of what REAL free market principles are all about and set them straight.

Or even better, you can send Bill Gates over there so he can lecture them personally "Listen fellas, you can get rich like I did in America by following the rules like I did! Now, lets roll up our sleeves and get to work!"

You are the one who needs a Hubble telescope, because you refuse to see, or admit to yourself, that this is what businessmen do, what they will always do, unless they are REGULATED. Greed and power is in their makeup, it is in their blood, like syphillis. It is who they are and what they do and the system they operate in selects for it and concentrates it. What you see in Russia and China is where Capitalism inevitably goes when it is not controlled and managed by a free people with constitutional institutions. Free market paradises don't evolve naturally, they are built politically, and they are resisted most vigorously by the free marketeers themselves.

Commercial free market competition will not keep businesses in line any more than it keeps rival gangsters in line. These people don't become criminals because someone puts a gun to their heads, they do it naturally, because its in their nature, and because someone never put a gun to their heads and forced them to play by the rules. Its happening in Russia and China and it happened years ago throughout most of Latin America and it will happen here if the Right Wing isn't stopped.

Your "virtue arising naturally from the self-regulation of a free market" is a sham, it never has worked, it never will work, it can't work. It may have seemed like it was working two hundred years ago because we had a rich, empty continent to expand into, but even then it was propped up by slaves, muskets, and the violent expropriation of land from those who actually lived on it.

These people don't care about your rules and principles or your quaint 18th century mythology. They didn't care about it in antiquity, or the age of Mercantilism, they didn't care about it in the Gilded Age, they aren't going to care about it here and now if the Republican Party gets its way.

Tom, you're a Fabian, a boy scout. You talk about the glories of a system that doesn't exist, and never existed, and in the one place and time in the world where it came the closest to existing, you work feverishly to undermine it.