this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2025
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capitalism worked pretty well in the 40's and 50's, in the USA, and then the corporate leaders realized that they could be overlords if they just stopped caring about everything but money.
We know kindness and money can coexist, but if little boy jack is taught from day one that if you don't game the system, you will lose, he's going to grow up to be Elon Musk.
It worked pretty well because there were a lot of regulations that kept it in check. Capitalism works fine if it's regulated either by governments or by workers through unions.
They knew they could be overlords and were that before The Great Depression too. We are just surpassing the level of wealth inequality that was reached prior to the system collapsing back then. What followed in the 40s and 50s was an abnormal period created by the implementation of a significant number of socialist policies that stemmed the desire for blood by the disposessed masses. These fuckers have been working to dismantle them ever since. If we find a formula that allows for such reforms to stick for longer than several decades, that would be nice. There's good reasons for skepticism though.
It's not quite true, USA and Canada were also far more anarchist in government traditionally, because, well, at some point they had too much territory loosely controlled and too many developing settlements and too thinly spread populations, and very dependent on new development.
40s and 50s were in many things driven by the defeat of Nazi ideology and imperialism crumbling. Not only humanism and peace were in fashion, but also nobody wanted to go to efforts to keep some brown or yellow people enslaved - sometimes it was "let them live" and sometimes "I don't wanna die", but the general mood was that it's obsolete to rob colonies.
So. Both socialist and western parts of the world somewhat choked that cultural desire of the populace by malicious compliance.
But one thing that didn't go through a cycle was the tendency for more fine-grained and total control, more detailed laws and overreach. That only grew in the course of XX century. Laws of the 50s were so simple compared to our day, that an average EULA is harder to understand. Laws of the 20s were as they show in the western movies.
So, I'm not going to say libertarianism is key, because any -ism being adopted doesn't mean automatically finding the solution. But the solution if it's found will be to this growth of complexity, empowering legal middlemen and interpretators and one nail drawers, and weakening anyone trying to live by the rules.
Yep, lots of regulation, not necessarily even socialist stuff , some of it was just prudent financial system management. Glass-Steagall for example and bretton-woods and stuff that limited limited power and sought to tame some animal spirits.