Above from Vanity Fair.
When the original that this parodies came out - 1971 - we hadn't even had Watergate.
There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”
I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”
Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair.
I found the Vanity Fair piece through this:
which I am now trying out. News Trust Net.
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