Laissez-faire, how did the government work to build and strengthen corporate capitalism?

Karl Marx did not invent the word 'capitalism', but he was the one who brought it into common use. He wanted a strawman to compare his philosophy of socialism to. He never explained what he meant by that word. People tend to assume that it is a synonym for 'free market' but it certainly does not mean that. The best definition I ever found was "the way we do things in the west." In the west we run businesses on borrowed money. In economics, capital is defined as "tools of production". Western businesses borrow to buy tools, so that is called a capital loan, and eventually the word came to mean any available funds.

"Laissez-faire" is French for "leave us alone", and governments NEVER leave anybody alone. Any time a capitalist business gets competition from a laissez-faire business, the capitalist business lobbies the government to shut it down. That's why there are no independent trains any more. The government regulated railroads couldn't compete against the more efficient independents, so the government shut them down. The capitalist railroads couldn't maintain profits, even though they were the only players in the game, so the government had to take over the entire industry, and now trains are a thing of the past.