The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself: schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes: to become a business proposition, to pay its own way, to show black ink on the bottom line. It turns news into entertainment, scholarship into professional careerism, social work into scientific management of poverty. Inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image. - Christopher Lasch, "The Revolt Of The Elites"
We are now seeing it begin to absorb nations.
It's a little like that giant planet-eating space turd on Star Trek.