Functional Anonymity

Let's begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion.  The approved reference now is to the market system.  This shift minimizes -- indeed, deletes -- the role of wealth in the economic and social system.  And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx.  Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces.  It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power.  They have now a functional anonymity.

-- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 - 2006), Canadian-American economist and author, "Free Market Fraud", The Progressive (January 1999)