Historical Note of Interest

Here's an interesting article from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo: The Rise of the Global Oligarchs. I'd just like to violently agree with this:

A central feature of the Early Modern era was weak and underfunded states licensing private entities to exercise state-like powers and then later trying to claw back that license. All of the colonies of that would later become the fledgling United States were founded on this basis. The arc of colonial North American history saw the English and then British monarchies trying to assert directly monarchical control over these fledgling societies. A better known example is the British East India Company which conquered and administered large parts of South Asia before being brought under tighter and tighter state control until being finally extinguished in the 1850s.