MAGA Wants to End Capitalism as We Know It

MAGA’s plans present a much more fundamental challenge to the workings of US capitalism than anything that Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders have ever dreamed up.

The most vocal critic of the managerial company is Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the most influential think tank in Trump’s Washington

Roberts’ objection is to the central feature of managerial capitalism: the divorce of ownership from control. 

The great historian of the corporation Alfred Chandler argued that the managerial company complemented the invisible hand of the market with the visible hand of management

Before the managerial revolution, companies were run by people who had a personal interest in their success, he argues: 

by founders who had invented the products that had made them great, family heirs who were rooted in local communities and local managers who had risen up through the ranks. 

Today, they are run by a corporate elite whose loyalties lie to the managerial class rather than to any one company. 

These MBA-trained, jargon-sprouting cosmopolitans are more interested in hitting the numbers than in producing great products and 

more concerned with the opinion of their fellow high-flying managers at Davos than in the feelings of their local employees.

Adrian Wooldridge Bloomberg 6 mars 2025

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at the Economist, he is author of “The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-03-06/maga-wants-to-end-capitalism-as-we-know-it

FDR’s attempts to revive the economy are viewed as a failure in light of the devastating second depression that occurred in 1937-38.

Instead, the Great Depression finally ended with the explosive growth of military expenditures starting in mid-1940. 

Capitalism in America: A History, by Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2018/10/fdrs-attempts-to-revive-economy-are.html

The modern Federal Reserve was created after John Pierpont Morgan had to organize a last-ditch private-sector bailout of the economy in 1907, locking his fellow bankers into a room in his house at 219 Madison Avenue.

The Glass-Steagall regulations separating investment and commercial banks were introduced by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933,

repealed by Bill Clinton in 1999,  partially reintroduced in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act that  followed the 2008 Lehman Brothers meltdown.

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England during the 2008 crisis, liked to point out that capitalist companies are global in life and national in death

 — always looking to their national governments to save them if things get difficult. 

Perhaps we will look back on these few weeks as the time when the era of free market truisms ended 

— and Western governments decided that finance was their territory. 

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Bloomberg 22 mars 2023

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-new-chapter-of-capitalism-idea-that.html