To be fair, going by the track record, if Venezuela was an oil rich government under a U.S. supported authoritarian, Caracas would look more like Riyadh and there’d be no need for cruisers.
Not saying it justifies Trump’s action in the slightest. Just a point of order.
In line with your comment, I wish people that believed in the military industrial complex theory would look at the defense market cap more often and realize that, even in their own reality, their theory doesn’t make sense.
If money controlled politics to that degree, Trump already wouldn’t be in office right now because every large corporation would be fuming at his stock market nonsense with tariffs. Apple alone has a larger market cap than every public US defense contractor combined and wars tend to not do good things for the rest of the market.
The MIC influence doesn't come from money, but power. As our soft power has been dying for decades and is verging on non-existent, the main way that the US exerts influence worldwide is by threatening to attack you, threatening to give weapons to somebody else who will attack you, or by threatening to no longer give you weapons imperiling your ability to attack people. And this is all 100% fueled by the military industrial complex. Without the military industrial complex US influence on a global level would rapidly plummet. And this influence also plays a major, if indirect, role in economic matters by helping to, amongst other things, maintain the USD.
When the entire government is dependent upon you for such a critical role, it's basically inescapable for them to end up with an amount of influence that can't be overstated. This is precisely what Eisenhower tried to warn us of. Well one among a few things, all of which he ended up being completely, and unfortunately, correct on. [1]
The value of war to industry doesn't stop at companies that are labeled as 'defense market.'
They are buying pencils, IT, software, gasoline, electrician services, plumbing services, non-defense contractors, education, health care, insurance, providing (via their actions on the other side of the coin) opportunities for fundraising and action for anti-war NGO and aid organizations, funneling money into industries in poor communities (via earnings of enlisted soldiers), and it goes on.
FWIW the easier evidence here is that if money controlled politics to that degree the tech industry would be our explicit overlords. The defense industry is a bunch of mid-size Fortune 500's with no particular economic might to note. I don't think there's a single one with more than $100B of revenue. Any of the top five tech companies could buy the whole lot with a few stocks swaps and no one would notice.
>Trump already wouldn’t be in office right now because every large corporation would be fuming at his stock market nonsense with tariffs.
1. Stocks are soaring right now. A few small shocks that recover in a week won't make corporate turn on Trump.
2. Line go up isn't the only thing corporations care about. Trump slash corporate taxes and is pretty much letting any merger go through. It's prime time right now to focus less on maximizing revenue and instead consolidste power.
The best part is that they are somehow having their cake and eating it. There's really been little downside if you're a billionaire corp in 2025.
Putting aside his made-up backstory, which is admittedly ad hominem, I've listened to his arguments, notably his video on debt and mortgages. It falls into the same trap as a lot of broadly populist economics - demonization of morally neutral economic concepts and focusing only on one side of the equation. This[1] entire video is him focusing on the bank side of a mortgage transaction, while never once considering the value given to the mortgage owner in being able to purchase an asset they never would be able to otherwise and gaining equity. Investment isn't just a hole rich people dump money into that prints stuff out for them and no one else.
Call it biased, but I'm also a priori skeptical of any public intellectual that points to their one pet theory as the cause of society's ills.
This is how I've felt about politics as of late. It's Logan Paul-KSI tier nonsense, but made worse by the fact that I can ignore Logan Paul and influencers. I can't ignore it when my government is run by an influencer.
Because the failures of the USSR occurred entirely within the USSR's borders, under its jurisdiction, and were entirely within its power to resolve. Meanwhile, the 9 million deaths of starvation you cite are across multiple countries with multiple overlapping legal regimes and are multi-causal, from corruption to war and failed states like Haiti and Syria.
There is risk to capital. The government does not bail out every business that fails. That's ludicrous. Investors like VCs can and do lose their investments all the time with no government intervention whatsoever. An owner is also risking in terms of opportunity cost - time lost to starting a business and failing is inherently riskier than working with similar talents and investing in safer assets like index funds for the potential upside of higher returns if the business succeeds.
Bootstrapped companies also come with risks to the founder's own capital and credit risk if loans are taken and the business fails to generate revenue to service them.
It's none of those. It's a representative considering the interests of multiple stakeholders and acknowledging the deleterious effects that well-intentioned legislation can have. If these issues were black and white, the solutions would be easy.
Not saying it justifies Trump’s action in the slightest. Just a point of order.