The Rise of the Predator State (parte I)

Chegou-me recentemente às mãos o livro "The Predator State - How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" de James K. Galbraith.
.
Decidi fazer uma leitura não sequencial dos capítulos do livro. Um capítulo que logo cativou a minha atenção foi o décimo "The Rise of the Predator State".
.
O autor remete-nos para a metáfora da predação, como elemento para a compreensão das relações económicas, tendo em conta as ideias the Thorstein Veblen, publicadas em 1899 no livro "Theory of the Leisure Class".
.
"Veblen's vision of an essentially stable order, yet dominated by a predatory and unproductive class, was plainly too subversive for the marketeers, yet it was also too cynical for the Marxists. And so it was effectively squeezed out of existence between them.
...
my father saw an economic world dominated by large interlocking organizations; his achievement as an economist was to analyze that world.
...
It was a world in which Veblenian predation was possible, but in which the predatory instinct might come under enduring organizational control. But as wr have seen, the project of using private organizations to tame personal power failed: the imperative of technological control over production processes was simply not strong enough, especially in an age of globalization, to keep the system in place. Power was again dispersed: to finance, to the tech firms, and to the CEOs.
.
This dispersion of power led to the reconnection of power with particular persons, and this, in turn, to a result that would not have surprised Veblen: the reemergence of predation, predatory conduct, and pathologically predatory conduct as a central theme in business life. Once power passes back from organizations to individuals, what are they going to do with it? Organizations may have complex social and technical objectives. Individuals generally do not. As Veblen told, for the leisure class, accumulation is mainly a way of keeping score.
...
But as power ebbed from the corporation in the late 1970s and 1980s and become vested, once again, in free-acting individuals of the type we have described, the basis for collaboration between comparatively progressive elemets within business and a broadely progressive state temded to disappear. Instead, business leadership saw the possibility of something far more satisfactory from their point of view: complete control of the apparatus of the state.
...
those who saw the economic activities of the government not in ideological terms but merely as opportunities for private profit on a continental scale.
...
This is the Predator State.
...
Whereas in The New Industrial State the organization existed principally to master advanced technologies and complex manufacturing processes, in the Predator State the organization exists principally to master the state structure itself.
None of these enterprises has an interest in diminishing the size of the state, and this is what separates them from principled conservatives. For without the state and its economic interventions, they would not themselves exist and could not enjoy the market power that they have come to wield. Their reason for being, rather, is to make money off the state - so long as they control it. And this requires the marriage of an economic and a political organization, which is what, in every single case, we actually observe."