Industrial Capitalism, Finance Capitalism and Socialism

The distinction that economic historian Michael Hudson makes between productive industrial capitalism and rent-seeking financial capitalism is critical to understanding all of human history for five thousand years. Thank you very much, Michael, for everything you have done and continue to do to help humanity understand its own history and the basic economic forces driving those historical events today. China and Russia have succeeded in taming their own rentier class, which is why they are so productive that the countries dominated by economic oligarchies in the West cannot compete with them. The economies of the United States and Europe are dominated by oligarchies, and no distinction is made between financial capital accumulation and productive industry. Libertarianism is the philosophy of oligarchs because the central idea of it is that governments cannot tell people what to do with their money. This philosophy is bought by many poor people who can’t afford the high taxes that their oligarch-dominated government is charging them, even though it no longer uses those taxes to provide decent health care, education and infrastructure. They don’t want the government telling them what to do with their money either, same as the oligarchs, so they support lower taxes too. The oligarchs laugh all the way to the bank.