> it's clear to anyone with a thread of financial literacy

That's argument from intimidation and not a valid form of argumentation.

> In effect, late stage capitalism becomes the anti-thesis of the spirit of capitalism - devoid of competition, free innovation, and upward mobility

Fortunately the world isn't in late stage Capitalism, because there is no such thing. As one obvious example, China has only begun to emerge from its backwards Communist shell, it's still in the first innings of its application of basic market economics. It's still doing trial runs market economic structures in things like asset ownership in general (eg equities), banking and real-estate. Its currency and bond markets are in the very early development stage. Other emerging economies such as Vietnam, Nigeria, Brazil, India are similarly going through their own very early stage experiments with market economic structures.

In the US, more people are moving up and out of the middle class, than are moving down and out of it. That has been the consistent trend for 50, 30, 15, 10 years.

There's zero evidence to support the notion that either the US or the world are meaningfully devoid of competition. It's competetion in fact that is terrifying so many. 20 years ago Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Apple, Priceline, SpaceX, Airbnb, Oracle, PayPal/Stripe/Square, Cisco, Uber/Lyft, Airbnb, Spotify, Tesla, T-Mobile, eBay, et al. were either non-existent or small compared to established corporate giants. That's just for the US, China has hundreds of business giants that didn't exist 20 years ago at all.

There's so much competition coming from the US tech giants, the EU is taking aggressive government intervention steps to begin restraining them from routing European competition. That's the exact opposite scenario of not having competition.

Leaders in AI? Not IBM. It's AWS, Google, Microsoft, etc.

Leaders in vehicle automation? GM had to buy its way back to the table, Ford is still running far behind. Companies like Google, Tesla, Uber, and dozens of smaller SV companies, have led the charge.

Leader in electrification of vehicles? Tesla has overwhelmingly led the charge, most everyone else (except perhaps for Nissan and partially GM) is running from years behind.

ULA for the future of space launch? No, it's SpaceX and Blue Origin.

GE? Dying.

Exxon? Dying.

IBM? 21 straight quarters of revenue decline.

Alcoa? Who?

US Steel? Who?

Sears? Dead. Walmart? Mortally terrified of a company that didn't exist in 1993. JC Penney? Dead. KMart? Dead.

Pfizer & Merck? Say hello to Celgene, Biogen, Gilead, Amgen, Regeneron, Vertex, Genzyme, et al.

Banking? Welcome to the online, payments, crypto revolution. Ant Financial is moving more money every year than most of the US financial giants; it didn't exist in 2003. Square, Stripe, PayPal, Ant, Google, Facebook, Apple, Samsung, et al. are setting the stage, not JP Morgan or Bank of America.

Travel? Priceline is more powerful than most airlines or large hotel chains. Ditto Airbnb.

Taxi industry? Largely dead, destroyed, bankrupt. Million dollar medallions? Gone. Say hello to Lyft, Uber, Didi, et al.

Food delivery etc? Booming. Dominated by Sysco, McDonalds, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Heinz? Nope. Companies like UberEats, Grubhub, Blue Apron, and dozens more.

Old media? Dying and desperate. Newspapers? Dead. Old radio giants? Dead. Cable? Bleeding out. Say hello to Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Hulu, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

The list just keeps going.