> The textbook view of the American economy is that it's free market competition. Companies are fighting it out. Different toothpaste companies are trying to sell you different toothpaste and it's a largely competitive market. Every once in a while there's an externality that requires government intervention and then you get these weird things like the "too big to fail" banks, but those are exceptions.

> I can tell you my experience, having been now in startups for 30 years, is that the opposite is true. James Burnham was right. We passed from the original model of capitalism, which he called bourgeois capitalism, into a different model, which he called managerial capitalism, some decades back. And the actual correct model of how the U.S. economy works is basically big companies forming oligopolies, cartels, and monopolies and doing all the things that you expect oligopolies, cartels, and monopolies to do. And then they jointly corrupt and capture the regulatory and government process. They end up controlling their regulators.

Made me think of Thiels “competition is for losers”