HuMcK said:
Meanwhile, the Trump admin is buying direct stakes in some major corporations, handing out billions to others like candy in the form of tarriff refunds, but "socialism".
People are tired of exclusively supply-side capitalism and what it's doing to the (shrinking) middle class. I am a capitalist, but the Republican crusade against any and all regulations or rule enforcement in the least 15ish years is leading us down a path of ruin and it needs to be corrected. People are waking up to the fact that basic consumer/labor rights and protections come from the left, not the right (because they are actively hostile to those concepts). You even hear people like JD Vance correctly identify some of the problems, while every policy action they take just makes it worse.
Literally nobody is advocating for the Soviet style communism you build up as a strawman, they're just tired of the naked corporatism and monopolization.
Falling short of Soviet style communism isn't a flex, and even if your critique of Trump's interventionism holds weight, that doesn't excuse the alternative. Modern regulatory expansion doesn't need to seize the means of production outright when it can achieve the same central control through an expansive administrative bureaucracy.
Enterprise level corporations possess the legal teams, capital, and compliance departments needed to absorb massive regulatory overhead. Smaller competitors and startups do not. Megacorps frequently tolerate...and even lobby for complex regulation because it functions as a legal moat, forcing out smaller players who can't handle the costs and locking in their own market share.
What gets marketed as "basic consumer and labor protections" manifests in practice as extreme compliance burdens that choke out new market entrants and consolidate power among incumbents. Look at the housing crisis dude: it isn't caused by an under regulated free market, but by excessive local regulations, restrictive zoning laws, endless environmental review delays, and strict licensing rules that make building affordable housing virtually impossible.
