So for the benefit of those of a liberal disposition watching us who do believe that in the end the market is a superior system, uh, I'm going to let you just very briefly, before we move on to bigger questions, can you re- you know, share in your inimitable way your basic criticism of market capitalism?

Market capitalism, if I have to give it, uh, in a short exposition, suffers from the following qualities that it has tried and repeatedly failed to overcome.

Number one, it is tendentially driven to produce extraordinary inequalities of wealth and income.

This is a devastating horror.

It is so extreme and so beyond the capacity of the system to manage that periodically it provokes an uprising of the poor, who stop the tendency for a while, and as soon as that is overcome, it resumes.

Example, the history I just gave you.

Our inequality goes up until it hits the 1930s, then it crashes as a result of what was done in the '30s, and in, starting in 1945, it resumes again.

Hmm

We're already seeing, of course, supply chains being degraded, how difficult it is to resurrect them, and what the consequences of serious damage to supply chains are.

Okay.

It, it's a really good place to start, Chris, uh, because it allows me to talk a moment about economic history.

Particularly since the 1970s, uh, major large capitalist corporations, American but also Western European, Japanese, and others, have, uh, followed the guideline of profit maximiv-imization, the religion of capitalism, uh, to move production, to make a long, complex story short, to move production around the world from being concentrated in the United States, for example, to being spread all over the world.

You know, in 1970, Detroit was the center of the automobile industry for this country, and surrounding Detroit were literally hundreds of medium and small businesses that fed the auto industry.

Uh, but they were all within 20 to 50 miles of b- of Detroit.

All of that is gone with, uh, Detroit showing it, its population today, just to give you an idea of the social consequences, is about 700,000 people.

And what are the effects of this on, let's, on the empire itself?