The point I'm making here was well understood in the post-WWII era. Here's the cartoon version: "Meet King Joe".[1] The more serious version, "Despotism".[2] The hard sell version, "How to lose what we have."[3] All of these were produced for industrial companies.

It's worth understanding how this was viewed by the generation that won WWII.

[1] https://archive.org/details/MeetKing1949

[2] https://archive.org/details/Despotis1946

[3] https://archive.org/details/InOurHan1950_3

wow!! thank you for bringing up these videos.

seems also then the american elite lost the way -- engaging in financial engineering rather than actual production.

Nope. Private capital allocation decisions are the foundation. It is a mistake to mix this with wishful thinking. Anticompetitive incentives and behavior are a natural emergent property on top of the foundation (network effects, platform effects, last mile dynamics, dumping, hell even economies of scale are intrinsically anticompetitive at the same time as they are intrinsically beneficial). Regulation to restore competition amid these natural anticompetitive tendencies can keep them in check and most people would agree this is generally a good idea -- but most people don't make the capital allocation decisions and most people don't learn about the world except through media controlled by people who do, so not only are the regulations 3 stories above the foundational principle, they are doubly insulated from effectively checking the dark forest on the second story by the very nature of the foundation itself.

capitalists have rivals, but capitalism does not