Listen to "The Word for What America Has Now Is Not Capitalism"AI Narration
Walk into a chain restaurant in Phoenix, Charlotte, or Indianapolis. The server will ask whether you want Coke or Diet Coke. If the restaurant runs Pepsi, you will be offered Pepsi or Diet Pepsi. You will almost never be offered both. You will rarely be offered an independent brand at all. The two companies' carbonated soft drinks together account for roughly 70 percent of the American market by volume; everything else (every regional brand, every craft soda, every challenger) splits the remaining sliver of less than eight percent.[1]
This is not what Americans prefer. Walk into a restaurant in Berlin or Mexico City or Bologna and you will encounter a profusion of national, regional, and independent beverages on the same menu. The American situation is the result of exclusive pouring rights contracts: agreements in which Coke or Pepsi pays restaurants, schools, and stadiums upfront cash, supplies the equipment, and takes the right to lock every competing brand out for the contract's duration. University signing bonuses run from five hundred thousand to thirty million dollars depending on enrollment.[3] The U.S. General Accounting Office documented in 2000 that most large school districts had signed multi-year exclusive deals, some with sales-minimum clauses that gave schools a financial incentive to push consumption.[2] No FTC consent order has ever been issued specifically targeting these contracts as anticompetitive.
That is the visible end of the system. At the invisible end is something stranger.
Between roughly 2017 and 2023, large institutional landlords across the United States began adopting a software product called YieldStar, sold by a Texas firm named RealPage. The software collected actual lease transaction data (not advertised rents, but the rents people were really paying) from thousands of competing apartment buildings, pooled it into a centralized warehouse, and returned algorithmic pricing recommendations that no individual landlord could have generated alone. Property managers accepted the recommendations 80 to 90 percent of the time. In Seattle's Belltown, ten property managers controlled 70 percent of all apartments, and all ten used RealPage. One landlord told the company that its rents began rising within a week of installation and were up more than 25 percent eleven months later.[4][5]
A former DOJ prosecutor, Maurice Stucke, called this "a new kind of cartel." The Department of Justice eventually agreed: in August 2024 it sued RealPage, and in January 2025 it sued six of the nation's largest landlords. The DOJ's framing was unusually direct. "In the past, collusion happened with a formal handshake in a clandestine meeting. Algorithms are the new frontier."[5][22] The case settled in November 2025 with no admission of wrongdoing, no fines, only a court-appointed monitor.
Six months later, in May 2026, the DOJ settled an analogous case against Agri Stats, an information-sharing service that for decades had collected pricing, output, and cost data from American meat processors and distributed it back to those same processors, but never to the buyers, the restaurants and grocery stores and food distributors who would have used the same information to negotiate. The DOJ's complaint observed that "when companies decide certain information is too sensitive to share with the broader market, but not too sensitive to share with their closest competitors, that is a significant red flag that competition is being harmed."[21]
The Coke-Pepsi restaurant menu and the RealPage rent recommendation are surface expressions of the same phenomenon. The American economy no longer satisfies the structural conditions that capitalism, as a theoretical system, requires to function: free entry by new competitors, price competition between firms, the absence of coordinated action to suppress that competition. The conditions have not been satisfied for some time. They have been deliberately dismantled, by both parties, over four decades, with the rhetoric of "free markets" supplying the political cover.
This article is an attempt to be specific about that claim and to ask what we should call the system that has replaced capitalism in everything but name.
The most important fact about American markets in 2026 is that the self-correcting mechanism on which textbook capitalism depends has stopped working.
The classical model is straightforward. When an industry earns excess profits, the high returns attract new entrants. The entrants compete, prices fall, profits revert to the cost of capital. This is the mechanism that justifies almost everything else economists say about market efficiency. It assumes that entry is possible and that competition is permitted.
Thomas Philippon, a finance professor at NYU Stern, traced this mechanism across U.S. industries from 1970 forward. Before 2000, a one-unit rise in Tobin's q (the standard measure of an industry's expected profitability) reliably predicted roughly 10 percent more firm entry over the following two years. After 2000, the elasticity collapsed to approximately zero.[6][7] Excess profits stopped attracting new firms. They simply persisted. And, predictably, they grew. After-tax corporate profits as a share of value added rose from a 7 percent average between 1970 and 2002 to a 10 percent average from 2002 onward, a roughly 40 percent increase in the share of national income captured by capital.[7] Over the same period, firms cut their reinvestment rate from about 30 cents per dollar of profit to about 20 cents.[6] When companies face no competitive pressure, they have less reason to invest in becoming more productive.
These are not artifacts of a single methodology. Grullon, Larkin, and Michaely, working from Compustat data on roughly three thousand industries, found that approximately 75 percent of U.S. industries became more concentrated between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s; concentrating industries also showed higher operating margins and higher stock returns, the signature of rising rents rather than rising productivity.[9] De Loecker, Eeckhout, and Unger, using a different method based on firm-level cost minimization, estimated that average markups of price over marginal cost rose from 18 percent in 1980 to 67 percent by 2016, with the increase concentrated among the firms at the top of the distribution.[8] Their methodology has been challenged: Susanto Basu of Boston College argues the magnitude is sensitive to assumptions about intangible capital, but the direction of the trend is not seriously in dispute.
The labor side of the same story is equally well documented. Azar, Marinescu, and Steinbaum, working from CareerBuilder vacancy data, found that the average American local labor market is "highly concentrated" by the Department of Justice's own merger-guideline thresholds, and that moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of local concentration is associated with roughly 17 percent lower wages for the same work.[27] Decker, Haltiwanger, Jarmin, and Miranda documented that the share of U.S. employment at young firms (the new entrants who are supposed to keep incumbents honest) fell by nearly a third over the three decades through 2010, with the decline accelerating after 2000.[11] Covarrubias, Gutiérrez, and Philippon distinguished "good concentration" of the 1990s, driven by genuine productivity gains, from the "bad concentration" that took over after 2000, in which excess profits no longer attract entrants and concentrating industries spend more on lobbying.[10]
There is a defensible counter-argument worth taking seriously. Lanier Benkard and his coauthors have shown that when you measure concentration at the level of narrowly defined consumer products rather than broad industries, the picture is less alarming: the share of "highly concentrated" markets actually fell from about 44 to 37 percent between 1994 and 2019. Rossi-Hansberg and colleagues have shown that local product-market concentration in retail and services has declined as national chains have expanded into local markets. Both findings are real. But neither addresses the labor monopsony evidence, the wage data, the markup data, the investment collapse, or the political-economy effects that follow when a small number of national firms control upstream supply chains, downstream distribution, and the regulatory politics that govern both.
The aggregate picture is the one that matters for the question at hand. Profits up. Investment down. Entry collapsed. Wages suppressed. The mechanism that classical economists rely on to keep markets honest has stopped operating. This is not what a free market looks like.
If American capitalism has been hollowed out, who did the hollowing? The honest answer is that no single actor did it, and that this is precisely what makes it durable. The transformation was carried out across forty years through a coordinated effort to change the intellectual foundations of how regulators, judges, and elected officials think about competition. The blueprint exists. It is a memo.
In August 1971, Lewis F. Powell Jr., a Richmond corporate lawyer who sat on the board of Philip Morris and represented the Tobacco Institute, wrote a confidential thirty-four-page memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He titled it "Attack on American Free Enterprise System." Two months later, Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.[12]
The memo's analysis was that American business had been politically naive, assuming that the system would protect itself, when in fact "perfectly respectable elements of society," from the campus to the pulpit to the press, were undermining it. Its prescriptions were operational. Corporations should fund scholars to produce favorable research and place them at universities. They should publish books and popular articles to reach educated readers. They should monitor television and textbooks for anti-business content. They should build a litigation infrastructure to challenge regulation in the courts. They should mobilize politically through the Chamber of Commerce and trade associations rather than relying on individual firms. They should, in short, capture institutions rather than simply lobby them.
Each of those prescriptions was implemented. Historians of American conservatism trace the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the reinvigoration of the Business Roundtable directly to the Powell memo. The John M. Olin Foundation, with $370 million in available capital, funded the law-and-economics movement at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago, and seeded the Federalist Society, which a foundation officer later called "one of the best investments the foundation ever made." Heritage's 1981 Mandate for Leadership was distributed to every Reagan cabinet member; roughly 60 percent of its recommendations were adopted in the administration's first year.
The intellectual content of the takeover came principally from the University of Chicago. Robert Bork's 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox did the central doctrinal work. Bork argued that the antitrust laws had a single legitimate purpose: "consumer welfare," which he defined narrowly as allocative efficiency, the textbook condition that prices match marginal costs.[13] On this view, mergers were anticompetitive only if they could be shown to raise consumer prices in the short run. Effects on workers, on innovation, on the diffuse distribution of economic power that the original drafters of the Sherman Act had explicitly worried about: these were no longer relevant inputs.
The doctrine became official policy in 1982, when Reagan's Department of Justice issued new merger guidelines that institutionalized the consumer-welfare framework.[14] No statute had changed. Congress had passed nothing. The substantive law of antitrust was rewritten by an executive-branch document drafted by an Assistant Attorney General trained in Chicago School economics. The 1982 guidelines raised concentration thresholds far beyond the 1968 standards they replaced, and they treated price effects as the only metric that mattered. The Reagan DOJ subsequently challenged zero vertical mergers in eight years.
What followed was a sequence of Supreme Court decisions that made enforcement progressively harder. Verizon v. Trinko in 2004 effectively immunized monopolists in regulated industries from claims under Section 2 of the Sherman Act.[31] Bell Atlantic v. Twombly in 2007 raised the pleading standard for antitrust conspiracy claims so high that plaintiffs effectively need to allege the agreement before discovery is permitted to prove it.[32] Ohio v. American Express in 2018 required plaintiffs in two-sided platform cases to prove net harm across both sides simultaneously, a near-impossible evidentiary burden. Loper Bright v. Raimondo in 2024 stripped the doctrine of agency deference, subjecting every regulatory rulemaking to fresh judicial review.[33] Each decision was defensible on its own terms. Together they constructed a moat around the consolidated firms the prior decades had produced.
The point is not that this was a conspiracy. The point is that it was a deliberate, well-funded, multi-decade institutional project, and that it succeeded. The lawyers, judges, and economists who carried it out were not paid by Coca-Cola or Comcast in any direct sense. They were trained at law schools whose endowed chairs were funded by Olin. They were credentialed by the Federalist Society. They were credentialed by a profession that had learned to treat the consumer welfare standard as the natural state of antitrust law, rather than as a doctrinal innovation that displaced eighty years of more demanding case law in 1982. The coup was institutional, not conspiratorial, which is exactly why both parties have continued to operate within its terms.
The clearest way to see what concentration looks like is to take a guided tour through a few American industries. Each is a separate case. Each fits the same pattern.
In commercial aviation, the United States went from twelve major carriers in the 1990s to four (American, Delta, United, Southwest), controlling roughly 85 percent of domestic passengers by 2013.[17] Four mergers in six years did the work: Delta-Northwest in 2008, United-Continental in 2010, Southwest-AirTran in 2011, American-US Airways in 2013. The DOJ initially blocked the American-US Airways merger in August 2013, citing harms to competition on hundreds of routes and "a system for coordinating fare increases." Three months later it dropped the suit in exchange for slot divestitures at Reagan National and LaGuardia.[16] The structural problem the DOJ had identified, fare coordination across the merged network, was not addressed by the settlement.
The aftermath has been a textbook study in oligopoly behavior. When American introduced a fee for the first checked bag in May 2008, every major carrier followed within roughly sixty days. Total ancillary fee revenue rose from $1.4 billion in 2007 to $6 billion by 2012. When West Texas Intermediate crude collapsed from $107 a barrel in mid-2014 to under $50 by January 2015, ticket prices did not fall proportionally; the airlines reported record profits through 2016, and analysts on earnings calls openly praised "industry capacity discipline." The DOJ opened a civil investigation in July 2015 and closed it in early 2016 without filing charges. It could not prove explicit coordination as opposed to "conscious parallelism," meaning parallel behavior by oligopolists who do not need to communicate because they all understand the game.
In broadband, the AT&T monopoly that the federal government broke up in 1984 reassembled itself by 2006 through a sequence of mergers approved by the DOJ and the FCC. SBC Communications, one of the seven Baby Bells, acquired AT&T Corp in 2005 for $16 billion and BellSouth in 2006 for $86 billion, then resumed the AT&T name. Most American addresses now have one or two choices for high-speed broadband. The New America Foundation documented that the average American household pays 53 to 77 percent more per month for internet service than the average European household, and that eight of the ten most expensive broadband cities in the world are in the United States.[18] In 2017 alone, the year the FCC repealed net neutrality, the telecom services industry spent nearly $88 million on federal lobbying, with Comcast, the cable association NCTA, the wireless association CTIA, and Charter Communications leading the spend.[19]
In meatpacking, four firms (JBS, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef) control roughly 85 percent of U.S. beef processing capacity.[20] The structural consequence is twin market power: monopsony over the ranchers who sell cattle, oligopoly over the consumers who buy beef. The COVID-era plant closures of April and May 2020 made the dynamic visible. Cattle prices paid to ranchers collapsed; retail beef prices hit record highs; the packer margin (the spread between the two) widened to historically unprecedented levels. The farmer's share of every dollar Americans spent on food fell from roughly 31 cents in 1980 to 11.8 cents in 2024, a 62 percent decline that tracks almost exactly with the four-decade consolidation of the food-processing industry. The Agri Stats settlement in May 2026 confirmed that the same information-sharing model RealPage had pioneered in apartments had been operating in meat for decades.[21]
In healthcare, consolidation has happened simultaneously at every level of the system. UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the country, generated $371.6 billion in revenue in 2023.[25] Its Optum subsidiary employs or contracts with approximately 90,000 physicians, roughly one in every ten practicing American doctors and the largest physician employer in the country. Optum Rx processes more than 1.6 billion prescriptions a year. Change Healthcare, which Optum acquired in 2022 over DOJ objection, processes about one in three U.S. healthcare transactions. A single corporation now insures the patient, employs the doctor, manages the prescription, and processes the claim. There is no precedent for this concentration in American medicine. The structural risk became operational in February 2024 when a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare disrupted billing for more than 100 million patients. The average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health coverage hit $25,572 in 2024, having risen 7 percent in each of the prior two years.[26] A peer-reviewed systematic review of 55 studies on private equity in healthcare found price increases of 13 to 26 percent at PE-owned facilities relative to comparable non-PE providers in the same specialty and geography.[24]
In local services, private equity has perfected a strategy specifically designed to operate beneath the antitrust threshold. Acquire one veterinary clinic, one dental practice, one mobile-home park at a time; keep the original brand on the door so customers do not notice; raise prices once you control enough of the local market. In 2022 the FTC issued Section 6(b) orders to six major PE firms requiring them to disclose acquisitions that fell below the Hart-Scott-Rodino reporting thresholds; the inquiry found that the firms had made "hundreds of small acquisitions" that collectively created dominant positions without ever triggering merger review.[23] Veterinary practices went from less than 5 percent corporate-owned in 2010 to roughly 30 percent by 2022, with a single company (Mars Inc., which owns Banfield, VCA, and BluePearl) anchoring the consolidation. PE-backed pediatric dental chains have paid tens of millions in Medicaid fraud settlements for performing unnecessary procedures on children, including a $23.9 million payment by Benevis LLC, operator of the Kool Smiles pediatric chains, to resolve False Claims Act allegations in 2020.[41]
The pattern repeats. The mechanisms differ. The outcome is the same.
If oligopoly's effect on consumers is mostly visible in higher prices and worse service, its effect on workers is visible in the slower process of wages decoupling from productivity, of bargaining power eroding, and, most recently, of the geographic and contractual mobility that makes labor markets work being systematically taken away.
The Silicon Valley no-poach case remains the documented baseline. Between 2005 and 2009, Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm operated a secret agreement not to recruit each other's engineers. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt exchanged emails about it. The DOJ settled in 2010; the subsequent civil class action paid out $415 million. A 2025 study in the Economic Journal by Matthew Gibson estimated that the agreement suppressed wages at the participating firms by approximately 5.6 percent during the conspiracy period.[37] That number, produced by a documented agreement between a small number of identifiable firms, is the proof of concept for everything that follows. Coordinated employer behavior in concentrated labor markets bends wages.
Most of what has happened since has been less explicit and more difficult to prosecute. In September 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company would require five days a week in the office beginning January 2025, an aggressive reversal of the firm's prior hybrid policy. Within months, similar mandates followed at JPMorgan, Apple, Google, Meta, Salesforce, Disney, and Dell. Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, who has run monthly surveys of remote work since May 2020, documented a statistically significant peer effect: companies whose peer CEOs announce return-to-office mandates are significantly more likely to announce their own within the same quarter, suggestive of social mimicry rather than independent productivity assessment.[28] Bloom does not call this collusion. He calls it herd dynamics. The functional effect on workers is similar.
The honest analysis here requires distinctions that conspiracy theorizing collapses. There is no documented exchange of emails between major CEOs agreeing to coordinate RTO policy. There is no antitrust case alleging a hub-and-spoke conspiracy among employers and their consulting firms. The FTC's 2024 attempt to ban most non-compete agreements, which would have raised wages by an estimated $524 per worker per year across thirty million American workers[38], was struck down by a federal court in Texas before it could take effect. What exists is a constellation of structural features: concentrated institutional ownership across competing employers (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street together hold significant stakes in essentially every major public company); shared HR and management consulting frameworks delivered by McKinsey, Deloitte, and Mercer to multiple competitors at once; CEO peer networks at the Business Roundtable and Davos; commercial real estate exposure that gives both companies and their institutional investors a direct financial interest in keeping office buildings occupied. These features do not require anyone to break any law to produce coordinated outcomes. They are the same conditions that produced "conscious parallelism" in airline pricing.
Two additional pressures pushed in the same direction during the same window. The 2022–2024 white-collar layoff wave eliminated roughly 550,000 jobs in the technology sector alone.[39] And in January 2025 the Trump administration ordered all federal civilian employees back to in-person work, followed in February by an executive order authorizing mass workforce reductions through the Department of Government Efficiency. Roughly 75,000 federal workers departed through the administration's deferred resignation buyout program.[40] The simultaneous shrinkage of demand (private layoffs) and expansion of supply (former federal workers entering the private market) operated on the same white-collar professional labor pool in the same twenty-four-month window. Standard labor economics predicts what would happen to wages under those conditions. It happened.
Calling all of this "collusion" overstates what the public evidence supports. Calling it coincidence understates what the structural alignment of incentives makes likely. The most defensible claim is the one that most needs to be made: a market in which the same few institutional investors own the major employers, the same few consulting firms advise them, and the same few executive networks coordinate their public messaging is not a labor market that delivers competitive wages, regardless of whether anyone has technically broken the antitrust laws.
What keeps oligopoly in place once it has formed is not consolidation itself but the political feedback loop that protects it.
The Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC removed the legal restrictions on corporate political spending that had stood, in various forms, since the Tillman Act of 1907.[30] In its first decade after Citizens United, outside political spending in U.S. federal elections totaled roughly $4.5 billion, about six times the combined total of the previous two decades. Dark money (spending by 501(c)(4) "social welfare" organizations that do not disclose donors) exceeded $1 billion for the first time in the 2024 cycle.[29] Business lobbying outspends labor lobbying in Washington by a ratio of roughly 82 to 1; total federal lobbying expenditures hit a record $1.4 billion in a single quarter in early 2026.[29]
This spending produces measurable returns. Alexander, Mazza, and Scholz documented in a study of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 that one targeted tax provision returned approximately $220 in tax savings for every dollar spent on lobbying.[36] The pharmaceutical industry's roughly $400 million in lobbying expenditures opposing the Inflation Reduction Act's drug pricing provisions preserved an estimated $100 billion per year in industry benefit, a 250-to-1 return ratio. Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana congressman who shepherded the Medicare Part D legislation that explicitly prohibited the federal government from negotiating drug prices, became CEO of PhRMA the following year at a salary above $2 million. This is not corruption in the legal sense. It is the system functioning as designed.
The result is that antitrust enforcement remains a marginal political activity even when public opinion clearly supports it. Lina Khan, whose 2017 Yale Law Journal article had argued that the consumer-welfare standard was structurally incapable of addressing platform monopoly,[15] served as FTC Chair from June 2021 to January 2025 and represented the most aggressive antitrust posture the United States had seen in a generation. She blocked the Kroger-Albertsons grocery merger in federal court, a clear win.[35] She forced Amazon to abandon its acquisition of iRobot. But she lost in court on Meta's acquisition of Within, lost on Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and lost on the FTC's attempt to ban non-compete agreements. Her successor as acting chair, Andrew Ferguson, took office on January 20, 2025 and substantially narrowed the agency's enforcement agenda almost immediately.
The structural irony of Khan's tenure is that she demonstrated the limits of administrative reform as a substitute for legislative action. The post-1982 doctrinal infrastructure (the Chicago School consumer welfare standard, the Trinko and Twombly precedents, and the Loper Bright assault on agency rulemaking) gave courts the tools to overrule her at every turn. Restoration of competitive markets in the United States would require either an act of Congress overturning four decades of doctrine, or a generational change in the federal judiciary, or both. Neither is imminent.
The most damaging single fact in the case against the American system is comparative. Europe, the part of the world that Americans were taught to associate with sclerotic regulation and socialist tendencies, now has more competitive markets than the United States in most of the sectors where the comparison can be cleanly made. Mobile data costs roughly a third less in the European Union than in the U.S. Airline fares are dramatically lower. Broadband is faster and cheaper. The difference is not technology: the same global firms operate on both sides of the Atlantic. The difference is enforcement.
The clearest demonstration came in 2001. The Department of Justice approved General Electric's $42 billion merger with Honeywell. The European Commission, examining the same transaction under its own competition framework, blocked it outright, the first time the EU had blocked a merger already cleared by U.S. authorities.[34] EU competition law operates from a different premise than the post-Bork American consumer welfare standard. It treats market structure itself as a value worth protecting, on the theory inherited from German ordoliberalism that concentrated private power is a threat to political freedom and not only to consumer prices. The Directorate-General for Competition has structural independence from member-state governments. It has fined Google a cumulative €8.25 billion for conduct that the FTC investigated and declined to pursue in 2013.
This is the most consequential point of the entire argument. The American outcome was a choice. It was not made inevitable by globalization or by network effects or by the nature of modern technology. The European Union has access to the same technology, the same firms, the same global market dynamics, and arrived at a different result because it built different institutions and resisted the intellectual takeover that occurred in American antitrust law. The "free market" framing that sells deregulation in the United States is empirically inverted: the more heavily regulated jurisdiction has become the more competitive one.
What should we call the system the United States actually has?
The reflexive answer in much of contemporary culture is "late-stage capitalism." The phrase has become ubiquitous enough to function as a shrug, a way of gesturing at high rents, consolidated industries, and stagnant wages while implying that what we are witnessing is simply capitalism in its final, decadent form. The framing matters more than it appears to. "Late stage" suggests organic progression, the inevitable decay of an aging system, something happening to us rather than something done by identifiable actors with names and addresses. It is the linguistic equivalent of describing a demolition as a natural collapse.
The phrase is wrong on its own terms. There is nothing inherently late-stage about American economic conditions in 2026. Europe operates the same global economy with the same firms and the same technology and produces dramatically more competitive markets in airlines, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. South Korea and Japan have both rolled back periods of extreme corporate concentration through deliberate regulatory action. The United States has done it itself, twice: under Theodore Roosevelt and under Franklin Roosevelt. None of this would be possible if the present American system were the natural endpoint of capitalism rather than the contingent outcome of a four-decade political project.
"Capitalism" itself no longer fits the American case. Capitalism is a system in which competition disciplines firms, in which entry by new participants is structurally possible, in which prices are set by the interaction of independent buyers and sellers. The American economy of 2026 satisfies none of these conditions in the industries that matter most. "Free market" fits even less well: a market in which exclusive contracts foreclose competitors at the point of sale, in which algorithmic intermediaries enable competing firms to coordinate prices without speaking, and in which the largest insurers also own the largest physician networks is not a free market in any sense that Adam Smith would recognize. The phrase has been retained as branding precisely because the underlying conditions no longer warrant it. It does the same normalizing work that "late-stage capitalism" does from the opposite direction: one phrase frames the situation as inevitable decay, the other frames it as the freedom we have always enjoyed. Both close off the question of what is actually happening.
"Oligopoly" is closer. Across airlines, broadband, beef processing, beverages, health insurance, and rental housing, a small number of firms control most of the productive capacity and behave accordingly. "Plutocracy" describes the political feedback loop that locks the structure in place: corporate political spending, the revolving door, the lobbying ROI of 220 or 250 to one, the systematic capture of regulatory institutions and judicial appointments. Both terms are accurate as far as they go. The honest description is that the American economy has become a network of oligopolies maintained by plutocratic political infrastructure, ideologically defended by a Chicago School antitrust doctrine that is no longer the law of any other comparable jurisdiction.
This is not a partisan claim. The deregulation of American airlines under Carter, the financial deregulation under Clinton, the non-prosecution of Wall Street under Obama, the antitrust permissiveness of every administration from Reagan through Trump's first term, and the dismantling of the Khan FTC under Trump's second term are all moves in the same long game. Both parties have either actively contributed to the consolidation or declined to challenge it. The consensus is the problem.
The consensus is also what makes restoration possible only through a deliberate act, and deliberate acts begin with accurate language. As long as the present arrangement is described as "late-stage capitalism," it will be treated as a phase to be endured rather than a structure to be dismantled. As long as it is described as a "free market," its defenders will be able to invoke the prestige of a tradition the underlying system has abandoned. Theodore Roosevelt did not break up Standard Oil because he was opposed to capitalism. He broke it up because he understood that the trust was not capitalism: that allowing it to persist was what would discredit the system. The same logic applies now. There is no economic law preventing the United States from enforcing competition again. There is only a political and intellectual one. The first step in changing it is to stop using language that disguises what has happened. Call the oligopoly an oligopoly. Call the plutocratic infrastructure plutocratic. Reserve the word capitalism for systems that still meet its definition. The vocabulary is not the whole solution, but no solution is possible while the vocabulary continues to do the work of concealment.