[epistasis]

Their fortunes are already built. They have shifted into defensive posture. They don't care about enabling more people to do discovery, that actually puts their position at great risk of disruption. What they want is to have very little innovation, and be able to capture the innovation that squeaks through.

[gwerbin]

I don't think it's true that they want little innovation. This is a political move. It's a setup for an environment where only politically approved research can happen. So the innovation machine eventually restarts, but without all the side effects of things like unbiased public policy research and social justice movements that are politically misaligned with the ultimate goal of corporate autocracy presiding over techno-serfdom.

[whateverboat]

But eventually, this always fails as history has shown over and over again. It might take 40-50 years, but it will fail with devastating effects.

[epistasis]

Yes, and one reason the US has been so successful is because in the past 1) it was generally agreed that family dynasties should have limited ability to pass wealth generation to generation, and 2) that governance should be separated from wealth.

That's all being abandoned.

[gwerbin]

I don't think either your assertions (1) and (2) have been particularly consistent throughout US history. Leave aside the difficulty of defining what "successful" means, or should mean.

Just look at the (first) Gilded Age. It's pretty much you claim we didn't have in the past: Family dynasties and government sympathetic to the interests of wealthy business stakeholders. It took the better part of a century of hard fighting (including literal combat in some cases) to bring that to an end, and then we had what, 40 years? before the accumulated momentum of conservatism brought on the Reagan era.

And it's not a matter of just unions fighting it out in the textile mills and coal mines and railcar assembly plants either. After the Civil War the US Army was engaged in a widespread program of what would today be categorized as genocide, in service of business interests that thought they could make more money if you didn't have a pre-existing civilization in the Great Plains.

Go back a few decades further and you have the Civil War itself. Slavery was first and foremost profitable for cash crop plantation owners; everything follows from that.

[epistasis]

Sure it wasn't universal, and when we didn't have those things the US was worse off, I'm talking about the times when the US has been a world leader.

[epistasis]

Agreed, that's a better way to phrase my own thoughts than I was able to express.