Comment by antonvs

> Adam Smith would be absolutely appalled that we let things get this bad. This isn't what he wrote about at all. The free market is about economic coordination, not letting massive entities do whatever they damn well please at the expense of a society's quality. This is neo-mercantilism, the exact kind of thing he was vehemently disgusted with.

One problem is that the ambient propaganda has changed the definition of capitalism to exactly the problematic one you describe, so that arguing for a more sensible balance of the kind that Smith and others described is taken as an attack on capitalism itself.

These days I'm reminded more and more often of Wimp Lo from Kung Pow! Enter the Fist: "We have purposely trained him wrong, as a joke." Except people have been trained wrong to make them better targets for farming their capital.