There's a truly comforting sociopathy snuggled inside capitalism ideology: if markets are systems for identifying and rewarding virtue, ability and value, then anyone who's failing in the system is actually *unworthy*, not unlucky.
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That means the winners are not just lucky (and certainly not merely selfish), but actually *the best* and they owe nothing to their social inferiors apart from what their own charitable impulses dictate.
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The problem with good news in the real world is that it's *messy*. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency.
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Let's take a sec here and notice something *genuinely great* happening in the US government: the @CFPB's stunning, unbroken streak of *major*, muscular victories over the forces of corporate corruption.
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Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's *good* that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's *good* that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.
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It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" - we call it "secrets."
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Noted anti-capitalist agitator Adam Smith had it right: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
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Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true.
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