No.454975
Let me try to explain briefly the actual US system from the 1930s on. It's not FDR waving his mighty hand to move the economy, but the collection of large trusts that supported his government that make, effectively, planning decisions. The US government itself has, since the 1930s, paid far more attention to what their money is actually producing, and aims ostensibly for goals that are in the public interest. There is a myth that the public interest in America is limited, but in reality, what those who hold the government consider "the public interest" is very vast, such that the government is going to be in your business. You saw hints of this with Prohibition, the various health and eugenics laws (many of which are still in effect, some of them stronger now than they ever were). But also, the government has broad objectives. That these objectives are largely dictated by private interests does not change that they are plans towards particular uses of money, and the people in government possess their own objectives as a whole. The US state and government has an objective of keeping all the oligarchs and old money families happy, even if they are in shifting alliances and have antagonisms.
Of the trusts, though, there is a grouping that has established itself more or less permanently as the "private arm" of the state, stuff like Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, and so on that have an outsized role in dictating US policy. Those foundations and organizations are not going anywhere, and no one wants to abolish them or can threaten them in any serious way. To go against the establishment is to go against the actual US state and everything we've known. There are foundations that would like to displace the big dogs and replace them with organizations of a similar nature, guys like Cato Institute who want full privatization into the hands of them and their cronies. So there is some conflict at the top, but the established players have successfully sold the appearance that their organizations alone constitute the consensus that is possible in American politics, and the minor players can only work around the edges to try and engineer long-term trends. That has been the opposition's strategy since the 1930s - to engineer a "revolution" of sorts that would take on characteristics of a Nazi-type coup. The particular politicians and spectacles presented to the masses have in actuality little to do with this - no one will be elected without the blessing of the establishment, and someone likely sat Reagan or Trump down in the White House theater to tell the new president just how the game really worked. Call it workplace orientation.
Anyway, these foundations, trusts, and so on aren't actually run by the rich themselves. Quite literally, the very rich gave up direct executive control. The deal in the 1930s was an alliance between the oligarchs and their most capable employees, who had a reason to perpetuate the dominance of the trusts and the new institutions. Guys like Kissinger and a lot of the functionaries didn't come from anywhere special, but presented themselves as a scientific dictatorship that would decide what people were going to think and believe from now on. It was specifically set up to counter "an excess of democracy", and the formation of this preceded the 1930s in steps that were understood to lead to something like this formation. So a lot of the decisions are actually made not by a few rich porkies, but by a larger elite of functionaries who are strongly invested in their position against the masses. Those functionaries have an antagonism with their paymasters, and so the professionals are always seeking to establish themselves as something greater than the rich men behind the curtain, not just in the public imagination but behind the scenes. Letting the professionals take the lead in the public imagination is no great loss to the oligarchs, since they want to become invisible and secure against the angry mob. Behind the scenes… well, without the professionals, the trusts don't do much except sit on money. This is ameliorated because the rich themselves are in a position to take professional work, and have a hammerlock on deciding who is and isn't educated and who can be hired on. The ideology promoted by the establishment is one that is suitable to both parties - the rich keep their fortunes and are told how awesome they are, and the professionals get a machine that allows them to rule more or less absolutely, at least those who are at the very top of the machine and make the most important planning decisions. It is very intensely opposed to democracy and opposed to any economic activity that isn't controlled in some way, and it seeks to impress on the rest of the population that they should adopt the same ethos as the ruling establishment. Therefore, "greed is good", the neoliberal dogma, and particularly eugenics are promoted tirelessly, and must be. The moment this ideology is given up, the alliance that makes the past century of government possible is forsaken. Not one iota of disagreement can be tolerated on a substantive matter, and that's why any dissent which crosses the line to even say something meaningful is crushed utterly. The ruling establishment must create a total monopoly on intellectualism, and be in a position to dictate who can be what. This might be for some enlightened purpose, out of a belief that the people who put themselves in that position earned it and have no reason to give up power to a bunch of angry proles and agitators. But it is always a very aggressive monopoly, and in order to secure its position, it inevitably must resort to making the rest of society suffer and making the rest of society stupid. The ideal of such a society is that no one knows anything about anything, and the whole society is ruled by lies and myths. It will lie for the sake of lying, seeing the regime of deception as a kind of intelligence test to filter people for advancement.
Anyway the point of explaining all of this - and I'm sure this is all obvious but is normally pointless to say - is to tell you that, really, it doesn't matter whether there is a free market or planned economy, from the perspective of the capitalist. The market arrangement had always been tolerated because it incentivizes behaviors those who rule want, rather than the market being something they conceded to. This myth of "pure markets" is a very modern insanity. The planning mechanisms of a later capitalist country don't need to override the market, so much as work through it and excise the risk a market society brings to its wealthy actors. All the risks have to be borne by particular classes of people, and so the winners and losers of every crisis are pre-selected. It is through planned crises that major shifts in planning are implemented, and all of these crises are things that could be prevented with the slightest effort if it were desirable. Realistically, it would be possible to "freeze" market exchanges such that things largely remain stable. This would require a more vigorous intervention of the planners, such that it would appear far more like a planned economy than a market arrangement, but there was no reason for the planned demolition to occur when it did, except that it suited oligarchs for contractions of the economy to occur when they did - with the crisis of the 70s (though this was brought about by foreign entanglements), with Savings and Loan in the 80s, and the big ones being 2008 and 2020. The former affected most of the world, the latter was intentionally planned to align to a global lockstep strategy that has been in effect ever since. Knowing that the economy can be frozen, and that crises are planned, is one way in which the economic mystification can be sold. There is never a sense that economic crises actually point to something real or have material causes, because they really don't have material causes if we were to analyze the whole system, and many economists have. There is a whole unwritten story here, or a largely unwritten one. That is that, for the past few decades, vast sums of money disappear from the US, on the order of trillions of dollars, and a decent part of this is through the government's misappropriation. Large sums of money are transferred effectively to global capitalism, to this global system being established. The global system is the brainchild of the US-run trusts, and it's entirely the point. Simply put, the rulers of the US no longer have a need for the US as an entity. More than any other country in the world, the US government is to be reduced to nothing more than a human resources department, and all of its public features are increasingly used for nothing but social control and domination. Therefore, you get schools that don't teach even to the extent that they did in the past, power companies that don't provide power, roads that are continuously torn apart and rebuilt even though they could easily have been planned to last longer. It's not some spooky energy of capitalism that makes it inevitable, but a deliberate plan. Planned obsolescence is a terrible strategy in any long term, but if the plan is to have an excuse to extract rent and control people in every minute way, it is the only strategy which makes sense - to defuse the market and soak up productivity, redirecting it towards control. It would have made far more sense from a productive capitalist sense to build a thing once and keep it working, then move the productive assets to another thing, as there is no shortage of stuff that can be done. If there was nothing to produce, then it would make more sense for a capitalist to sit on their hoard, and that part is evident enough. To continue sitting on this hoard, and to expand the hoard, though, the capitalist's strategy would be to control its people and find every way to extract rent, not because it needs to but because it can.