It’s strange to treat oligarchy and the trend of capital towards consolidation (monopolisation) as if they’re distinct from capitalism and not mechanically promoted by captialism itself.

To do what Adam Smith demands, putting a leach on capital under capitalism, is a contradiction that is difficult or impossible to maintain, as we’ve seen. When a company has enough money to punch above the rest, they have the power to buy stakes in mass media news and other propaganda, they can bribe politicians or use their power to promote and empower the ones they can bribe, and they can do the same with institutional anti-corruption systems like lawmakers, judges, police. To inoculate a society against this power of the rich basically requires a departure from liberalism/capitalism itself, revoking the “freedom” of private capital owners to exclude others and abuse their position.

Get on my property!

This is important to emphasise. Older generations were, generally, in more of a bubble, it wasn’t easy to spread word with the same reach and authority as national mass media before the Internet.

Similar situation with other communication advances, like the telegraph, which allowed news of the world and the people around a country to learn and co-ordinate much better than before.

I know a few people in rural US who made the jump from a super right US Libertarian position in late-teens/early adulthood all the way over to Marxist positions. I’m not certain, but I suspect that the US Libertarian and Republican mindsets are often normalised there so people are raised with them by default, but a lot of the underlying ideas that validate the US Libertarian position, like individualism and “freedom”, work better as abstract ideas and tend to break down upon inspection. Most of the additional freedoms of the US don’t matter when people don’t have the money, health and other resources to make use of them. It just allows the rich and powerful to trample the rest.

Can you please share links to China’s homelessness statistics? Maybe my search engine is junk because I’m struggling to find any information later than 2011 (before some of the efforts to reduce it).

google (verb):

4. To search for (something) on the Internet using any comprehensive search engine.

It would be great if we had laws which stopped people from doing that (both our own citizens and foreign). I want landleeches to scatter from here just like they did from China. No home for house hoarders.