General Discussion

Capitalism: You can accrue wealth and start businesses and control them.

Corporatism: You can accrue wealth and start businesses, but ultimately the government bribes or controls you.

Mixed capitalism: You can accrue wealth and start businesses, but you're constrained by bureaucrats.

Socialism: You can't really accrue wealth and start a business because the state owns it all. But you can run a business, if you acknowledge your overlords.



China is corporatist. Or was. Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, everything for the state. Very Mussolini. Very Hitler--pro-universal education, universal health care, insisted on (state-controlled) unions on corporate boards. But if you made buttons, whatever. You made steel, useful to the state, you were told quotas and output levels. You needed to know who held the other end of your leash.

Capitalism? No leash. Socialism? You'd beg for a leash, but as it is the entire territory is linked to a shock collar.

Think of "mixed economies" as deviating from "total control" in two ways. Orders on the one hand (because you're pwned) and regulations on the other (to preserve the illusion of liberty).