It's easy for me to believe it's not always been (and doesn't have to be) THIS bad.

There's functional value in a capitalist system. It just requires ongoing maintenance, to avoid situations like we're currently in. It's not self-repairing. Operated properly, it makes market conditions self-repairing, but this is at the expense of the potential market capturers.

It was better when corporate tax rates and income taxes for the incredibly wealthy were much, much higher. My favorite hobby is putting Thatcher and Reagan's faces on economic graphs to show what year they were elected is almost universally either the same year or just about when the global economic system went bugfuck by basically every metric we measure.

But, thanks to those two and the larger political milieu they so well represent, those entities are now rich beyond all reason and in a capitalist system that permits things like Citizen's United, money more or less equals political power so the odds of getting any of this addressed are basically nil, along side other issues that would demand corporations make less money: like climate change, crumbling infrastructure, socialized healthcare for the US, better socialized healthcare elsewhere, the vanishing middle class, etc.

Private Equity is going to get us all killed in a very real sense.