Yeah, and he went away not because they voted him out but thanks to Soviet weapons.

I’m a commie, so I’m all for social ownership of the means of production, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, there isn’t a scale of how pure capitalism is: a Keynesian model is as capitalistic as laissez-faire is because the underlying relationships to capital are the same. Communism isn’t at the other end of any scale because it’s an entirely different model, not just more or less regulation.

Some may argue that no country is socialist because they are still transitioning, and that they are still capitalist, but that’s not a scale: they are not socialist (yet, hopefully) because their mode of production is still capitalistic.

Regulated capitalism is still capitalism. There’s no such thing as “pure” or “impure” capitalism, the social relationships to capital are the same. Lassiez-faire capitalism is just a flavour of it.

It’s like ice-cream: you may prefer chocolate ice-cream over vanilla ice-cream, but they are both flavours of ice-cream and you wouldn’t say “yea, that’s not pure ice-cream”. Some people may even dislike ice-cream altogether and prefer cheesecake.

He could even justify it to the fans as a collab with a well-known author, who would do the bulk of writing with Martin as a supervisor/big picture guy. Like if Jordan had spoken with Sanderson to finish WoT before he died.