Though the above is taken from a centrist position that I don't agree with, it's central point that the current political trends are leading us to "another age of robber barons" is one I definitely find to be accurate. Don't believe me? Check it out:
company towns are back! Remember those from the Gilded Age?! (Remember a certain name frequently cited in that article, by the way: Mark Zuckerberg.
He could be our next president!)
Companies buying whole communities really bothers me. In our globalized age where companies can grow much larger than they could back in the 19th century, their re-emergence could even just be the beginning! We could eventually be looking at a scenario where companies grow powerful enough to start buying whole states and provinces, and even nations! That would be the final step in establishing a modern, capitalist feudal order. If feudalism is essentially a situation in which the government is privately owned (perhaps by a particular family, religious institution, or general, for instance), then ownership of governments by particular corporations would mark the establishment of a new, modern brand of feudalism. That's one serious possibility as to where things may ultimately be headed on a much larger scale than towns, I fear. We may well be in a transitional stage thereto right now, methinks.