ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses public looting for private gain. Capitalism can be defined as 'an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state'. Implicit in such a system is the duality of the free-market-'an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses' and some sort of moderating state influence that ensures that its citizens. This 'political compromise' has been the traditional Western neo-liberal approach to capitalism following the excesses of the gilded age and the gradual enshrinement of reformist labor laws and tax codes in the United States and in Western Europe. Multinational corporations, which can also now be considered extra sovereign entities, have grown in size over the last half a century to become economic behemoths. Public looting is the extraction of wealth from the middle classes and public institutions of the United States and United Kingdom.
