But modern corporate capitalism seems incapable of seeing past the near future profit picture and has shown little interest in investing in anything that will not produce benefits in the investors’ lifetimes. Individual entrepreneurs like Bezos and Musk may still maintain that long-term vision, but the publicly held companies run by professional money managers simply refuse to act in the interest of the societies they serve. They’re in it for the short term.

The collectivist, publicly held corporation seemed like a great idea at the time, a means of democratizing capitalism so everyone could participate profitably and future generations benefit. But it doesn’t seem to be working out now.

You can justly criticize the greed and rapaciousness of the robber barons who laced North America with railroads in the 19th century, but at least those men had a vision for the future, a vision they knew full well would not be realized in their lifetimes. I just don’t see anything like that happening today.

We speak here often of the entrepreneurs and visionaries struggling to build start-ups that will drive space exploration in the 21st century. I salute these men, but I also see within them the seeds of their own destruction. As soon as they begin to achieve those lofty ambitions, when they start to serve a real societal need and generate real profits, they will be gobbled up by the great money-making mills of Wall Street, who will mercilessly squeeze all the profit out of them and then move on to something else.

I’ve heard it said, quietly, from time to time, that liberal democracies are powerless to address existential problems like global warming. Our record so far certainly backs that up; not just the simple fact of our failure to do anything meaningful, but tracking how malicious actors have manipulated and abused liberal democracy to push, among many regressive billionaire-friendly ideas, climate change denialism. Liberal democracy really is vulnerable to this kind of epistomological attack, and there really are forces like the Kochs who will use the levers of liberal democracy to fight against global warming mitigation.

Short answer: We’re screwed. Die of heat or drowning, or die in chains. Capitalism is all about choice.