Though, properly speaking, it isn’t the government that we’ve come so thoroughly to depend on, for our goods and services, but what I sometimes hear described as public-corporate partnerships, wherein the government and a private business jointly fund, manage, and administer or distribute the product that the business alone would ordinarily have been responsible for; which I suppose is a sort of socialist concept (and thus not entirely new), but which has assumed a new form in the global and digital economies, wherein the billionaire class and those with political agency are increasingly indistinguishable from each other, and the interests of the middle class and working class (as well as of the idle and disenfranchised), are represented in only a ‘pro forma’ way, which is to say by lip service.