From structural abuse to system capture: a direct critique of the corporate state and its drift toward totalitarianism
THE STATE IS ME
Ethical, moral, and social derailment toward totalitarianism
By Dr. Nelson Jorge Mosco Castellano
“Power that does not abuse is not power.”
An old and “playful” slogan of a pre-“monarchical” political mindset within democracy, which assumes an inequality of rights with those it represents, self-perceived as “justified” because “that’s what they were elected for.”
Some took it to heart, one could say excessively so.
One only needs to observe the countless cases of corruption of various kinds reported to the courts that remain unresolved.
The “VIPs” of power have always feasted on abuses—whether in the Executive, the legislature, or among judges and prosecutors. Part of the cost of service, they say.
Individual benefits, contracts for relatives, public tenders, bribes, kickbacks, commissions—this is the familiar parade behind public works allocations.
Many also reached the top through their own accumulation of illicit or hidden assets; that great passion for “green,” stored under mattresses or in more imaginative places, at home or abroad.
Funds they either feared or were unable to declare openly, which in turn allowed them, upon reaching key positions, to claim legitimacy based on being “successful.”
Resources stolen from the people under the argument that they were meant to accumulate power in order to help… the people.
Nothing illustrates better the saying: charity begins at home.
We do not have a State that serves its sovereigns, but a State that serves its corporations, while also grabbing a few dollars for its “public servants.”
This observation captures one of the sharpest critiques in both classical and modern political philosophy: the transformation of the State from a protector of individual rights into a manager of sectoral interests—or personal enrichment.
When the state apparatus ceases to focus on the individual—the true sovereign in the liberal tradition—and begins to legislate according to pressure groups, what many theorists call regulatory capture occurs.
The problem has three main axes:
Mercantilism vs. Liberalism:
Free markets are often confused with “crony capitalism.”
While the former is based on competition and risk, the latter uses state power to obtain subsidies, protective tariffs, or regulations that block new competitors.
Bureaucracy as an end in itself:
As Friedrich Hayek warned, the expansion of the administrative state creates a symbiosis between high-level officials and rent-seeking corporations.
Complex rules can only be complied with by those who can afford legal teams, eliminating the sovereignty of small entrepreneurs and ordinary citizens.
The erosion of equality before the law: If the State serves corporations—whether business, union, or bureaucratic—it breaks the principle of universal justice. The law ceases to be a general framework of conduct and becomes an instrument for redistributing privileges.
A vision toward individual sovereignty
To reverse this process, various thinkers propose returning to fundamental concepts:
The use of technologies that allow real-time auditing of public spending, reducing the margin for under-the-table agreements.
Returning decision-making power to the smallest units of society, limiting the ability of large structures to exert disproportionate influence.
Strengthening institutions: returning to a model where success depends on serving the consumer (in the market) or the citizen (in politics), rather than proximity to those in power.
The question that remains is whether these structures can be reformed from within, or whether change will come through technological disruption that renders corporate intermediation obsolete.
It is evident that change will not come from within, as it has been attempted and promised repeatedly, and only occurs under financing crises that bring systems to the brink of default—and sometimes even beyond.
This is a harsh conclusion, but one supported by economic history: power structures do not dismantle themselves voluntarily.
Whether because pre-electoral systems demand resources obtained through collusion, or because the machinery that appropriates resources from citizens cannot be stopped without risking systemic collapse, exposing a criminal consortium.
Resistance to change within corporatist systems tends to be absolute, since those who should execute reforms are precisely those who benefit most from the status quo.
When adjustment occurs only at the edge of default or terminal financing crises, it is not philosophical conviction but forced capitulation to arithmetic reality.
The State does not shrink out of efficiency, but because it has run out of other people’s money.
The loot is gone.
The trap of incentives and paradigm shift
This dynamic of “reform by collapse” suggests a scenario where the solution is no longer political, but structural and technological:
The corporate state functions as an intermediary extracting resources from sovereigns (citizens) to redistribute them among “protected” sectors.
When crisis arrives, this intermediation becomes unsustainable.
Symptoms of an exhausted structure
This phenomenon generates three effects that erode trust in the social contract:
The “Sovereign’s Suffocation”: The producer competes not only with external peers, but against their own State and its beneficiaries.
Each unnecessary regulation or excessive tariff acts as an indirect tax draining competitiveness.
When the cost of legality and survival becomes excessive, the most dynamic sectors—especially young people and tech entrepreneurs—seek friendlier jurisdictions or retreat into the informal economy, further weakening the tax base and creating unfair competition.
While the productive sector tightens its belt to subsidize the parasitic partner (the State), those who live off public budgets or protected markets are usually the last to accept that the model of “living off others” has reached its mathematical limit.
What remains is an unserviceable, anomic, and useless State that invents excuses, “future plans,” creates “new rights,” and expands unsustainable redistribution to maintain accomplices in the feast of living off others’ labor.
“The State is me” cannot restrain its greed until it collides with reality—or becomes the justification for those promoting a totalitarian society.
State capture and corporatism
Erosion of individual sovereignty
Collapse-driven reform dynamics
This analysis is part of the Global Order & Geopolitics framework