"Another way to put the same point is to ask _why_, in other periods, production offered higher profits than fiscal "products"? It's the change that has to be explained, not one situation in abstraction. Why did production cease to be profitable? A change in the humabnnature of rentiers?"
Didn't Marx talk about this in the business cycle...that when the organic composition of capital became very high, with maturing technologies, profits decreased, and that was the point when speculation (finance capital) was the only strategy left to increase profits e.g. through consolidation (mergers and aquisitions of the 80's), credit expansion, lowering labor costs in whatever way possible...outsourcing, preferential tax treatment, gov subsidies, etc.
Joanna