Posted on 01/14/2014 3:50:41 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
If popes and presidents have anything to do with it, 2014 looks set to be the “Year of Inequality.” Already the rehashing of old, old arguments has begun in earnest. Economists, for instance, are re-disputing the inequality statistics. Others are re-debating perennial philosophical questions such as what we mean by inequality and (depending on the meaning) whether it’s always a bad thing.
You don’t, however, have to join most of the contemporary academy in worshiping at the altar of the prophet of modern liberal egalitarianism, the late John Rawls, to recognize that some seriously unjustifiable inequities do characterize virtually all modern societies. And one such injustice, though rarely spoken about in these terms by many politicians..., is the rise and rise of crony capitalism.
......Crony capitalism is not criminal activity or outright corruption — though it verges on, and often enters, these spheres. Crony capitalism is about hollowing-out market economies and replacing them with what may be described as political markets.
In political markets, the focus is no longer upon prospering through creating, refining, and offering products and services at competitive prices. Instead economic success depends upon people’s ability to harness government power to stack the economic deck in their favor. While the market’s outward form is maintained, its essential workings are supplanted by the struggle to ensure that governments, legislators, and regulators favor you at other people’s expense. In that sense, crony capitalism certainly constitutes a form of redistribution: away from taxpayers, consumers and businesses focused on creating wealth, and towards the organized, powerful, and politically-connected.
So who are the crony capitalists? Obviously it includes businesses who lobby governments and legislators for exemptions, monopolies, subsidies, access to “no-bid” contracts, price-controls, bailouts, tariff-protection, preferential tax-treatment, and access to government-provided credit at below-market interest-rates......
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
Yep, so glad the Democrats “drained the swamp” when they took over Congress in 2008.
so what he is calling “crony Capitalism” the rest of us call socialism.
“All that matters in a crony capitalist world is closeness to state power.”
It’s well written and worth a full read.
Exactly right.
Perpetuated by Democrats and Republicans.
It sure is. Thanks for posting it.
Wonderful article! This needs to be written and talked about more. Bravo, Mr. Gregg!
Income inequality is but an extrapolation of generic inequality. The unequalness begins the moment of birth.
Equality of economic outcomes is not the legitimate business of government. Equality before the law is. Which few in government seem to understand these days.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men...”
I read a book about this back in 1960. I think it was written by a woman.
I will bet that you’re referring to this classic text:
http://www.cato.org/three-women-who-launched-movement/the-god-of-the-machine
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini
The God of the Machine came after Atlas Shrugged, for me.
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