America Has Replaced Capitalism with Cronyism
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Wait, what happened to the robber barons? I guess they didn't have PACs.
Oligarchs depend on the administrative state for their security.
The oligarch pays (bribes, political donations, what have you) the state $5 so that the state will spend $10 screwing the competition and then the oligarch's business will make $10. Of course I made these numbers up but the system by which these people hold power doesn't work if there isn't an administrative state with the power to fairly capriciously regulate the oligarch's business. The whole game is predicated on being able to buy unfair access state muscle. If the state is sitting on its ass there's no advantage to buying favor.
I guess on reflection my parent description is not quite right, but your comment brings up maybe the real distinction: if you were a true oligarch, you wouldn't have do that, you would just have government influence, or, at least have it 'quite easily' for some definition of easily.
It would completely disingenuous to say that there's no difference between the US and Russia but I think there's more in common than we'd like to admit.
I wouldn't be mad at Bernie if he called executives out for behaving like Oligarchs.
It didn't consist "of" robber barons. It was a tool they used when it suited them. I call that cronyism.
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</script>Same with cronyism. Actors have every incentive to bend rules to benefit them. The solution is to fight against it.
It hasn’t been replaced, some people are just realizing the things that have been pointed out since critics of capitalism coined the name “capitalism”, refelecting its favored-class orientation, for it.
That's modern-day America (and western countries in general), but massive government taxation and borrowing, and spending on bloated, inefficient, and corrupt programs to buy votes and scratch backs won't get more love from "capitalists" than it will from anybody else.
It's not capitalism that is going bad, it is government.
It's capitalism, not the government.
Government propping up special interests is pretty anti capitalistic, whether it's a corporation, an unemployed person, or a college student trying to default on their loans.
So I am assuming a purely capitalistic system would let the elderly and the disabled die on the street begging for charity? Are you advocating for such a system? Because no thank you, I am good.
I wasn't advocating for anything in these posts by the way, so your rhetorical question is not an argument. Here is one for you though, do you believe that in communist China, Vietnam, USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, etc., that there were no homeless or beggars?
Your effort at deflecting is adorable
I've seen this tired argument so many times in last year: you make millions pumping crypto, you're just a genius capitalist and not a regulatory arbitrageur. If you lose money falling for another person's pump and dump, it's the government's fault for not saving you or making you whole. For these people, government only exists to enrich them/save them from the downside, just what this article talks about.
This isn't all that profound though. People can advocate for a policy or structure of society while also acting in their own interests in any given situation. And you will find countless examples of that in any position or belief, whether it is social housing advocates lobbying against cheap housing being built in their neighborhood or climate activists flying their private jets around, or government school and healthcare advocates sending their family to private schools and hospitals.
And thus we should have a set of rules we agree that is enforced consistently to increase fairness in the system. We can even charge a group of people with that _governing_ duty, and call them something like _government_?
I don't agree that follows from my statement though, no.
It’s not so much the cronyism itself but just how large of a chunk of the pie they took this time. See salary vs house price trends. The remainder is so small that basic structures of society are starting to collapse (can’t afford education, house, kids, healthcare etc)
Had it not been turned up to 11 this could keep going.
America lead the world 100 year
Wrong. That’s not what capitalism is or means. Capitalism is an economic system in which private investors run the economy in search of personal profit, while those who lack capital rely on wage labor to survive. You can debate whether this is a good or moral system, but it’s important to get terminology right.
Asking for a friend.
Actually, a few billion friends, come to think of it.
One thing that immediately comes to mind is that first-past-the-post voting systems seem to produce pretty bad results, basically always devolving into a two party system which enables easy us-vs-them rhetoric. And while people love to debate which alternative system is the absolute best, there are many in use around the world that produce better results.
1. A violent revolution against capitalism that destroys it.
2. You slowly contain capitalism and wind it down, making the elite increasingly irrelevant, as it appeared the US and Europe might have been on track to do from 1933-73, until you’ve basically achieved socialism without necessarily calling it that.
3. Capitalism continues to corrode the restraints put in place to contain it until you have an oligarchic nightmare like the US.
3 is completely unacceptable; 1 is a bit better but still involves people getting killed. 2 is probably best if you can pull it off, but the problem is that it requires society to do the right thing for decades whereas an overthrow of capitalism can be done in weeks.
Cronyism is just another way to say "Late Stage Capitalism."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#Polybius
Once the first set of greedy people gets powerful enough, they change the playing field and cement their lead.
75% of those billions pulled out of poverty were in China [0], which is explicitly not capitalist.
[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
Capitalism and democracy are older than the PRC, and the billions aided by it include the entire modern western world.
The "last few decades" are around what I would call the last 40 years, wouldn't you agree?
The entire modern western world got rich not through some capitalist miracle, but by brutal imperialism and subjugation of the third world.
All governments suck, all economic systems suck, and it all sucks because people are flawed. We can always try for better, but so far every system that humans design, humans also corrupt and destroy.
I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.
Not having an economic system sounds impossible. In the absence of a planned system, there would be one that spontaneously emerges, in all likelihood one that's even easier to corrupt.
Not having a government would be more viable, but without a central power we would just revert to "might makes right", which is not so different from cronyism. Not to mention all the problems when infrastructure becomes profit driven or disappears, basic education has to be provided by private teachers, etc.
Communist have been claiming to be able to predict the future for the past two centuries. Certainly this time you will get it right?
"Capital", in this context, means the ownership of the means of production (classically factories, but in this century as much pointed to data, land, and regulatory capture). Specifically, the means of production that you do not operate.
If you must do labor for a living, you are not a capital owner. Stop identifying with the class of owners when you are a "working stiff" even if you're making mid six figures in tech or as the owner of a small business. In "Wall Street" Gordon Gekko was talking about "400k-a-year working wall street stiffs", and that's a million a year or better these days, after inflation.
I'll also have to remember that Capitalism is all about owning physical tools, not anything about making money from people doing work for you. So if I contract freelance kitchen staff to make and sell food for me, when they show up with their own knives, they are the capitalists, not me. Interesting!
Yes and yes, I’m a laborer and I wouldn’t take profits off someone else’s work unless we are all sharing the returns aka anarcho syndicalism. I can but won’t subject workers to the exploitation and role based hierarchies I myself escaped. It’s not necessary.
I don't know that I'd put a guy who owns a truck, a leaf blower, a lawn mower, a collection of garden sheers/related tools, and has a client base; I wouldn't put him in the same category as a bank CEO who makes was $5 million a year. Maybe I should though because the guy with the truck's been sold this load about freedom and entrepreneurial spirit that a FANG engineer making $300k/yr didn't buy. Personally, the guy with a yacht, a jet, a summer and winter home, who has enough money to never work another day in his life if he doesn't want to; that guy is definitely burgeoise. The guy that's gonna go hungry and have trouble making rent if he's not outside in the heat of the summer midday sun to landscape most days, just because he owns the truck he drives? Feels like I have a lot more in common with him, which makes it hard to want to throw him against the wall when the revolution comes. Maybe joining the burgeoise should have a $1 million initiation fee, but includes a free subscription to Netjets.
Quoth wikipedia:
> In the 19th century, Marx distinguished two types of bourgeois capitalist: (i) the functional capitalists, who are business administrators of the means of production; and (ii) rentier capitalists whose livelihoods derive either from the rent of property or from the interest-income produced by finance capital, or both.
That is, managerial staff (low level managers better, these days, better fit the description of petit bourgeoisie, I think), and owners. Talking about a man who owns his own tools, employs himself but no others, you duck either category - perhaps you're thinking of someone who employs others and manages them, in which case, I agree, they've moved into the position of earning part of their income from management.
But merely having the tools you need is not "the means of production" classically - that would be real estate and finance more than directly tools. You begin to cross that threshold when my hypothetical car repair or building maintenance guy also owns his shop (or building) and the land it's on - but even so, I think the distinguishing characteristic is not merely ownership of land and finances, but subsisting primarily on the rents and/or administration thereof. If my hypothetical car repair guy had retired, rented his shop out, and leased tools to people he employed, yes, obviously.
But I think you'll find that many of the people who identify as business owners are, in this analysis, tradesmen and working men first and foremost, rather than earning their income primarily as administrators, rentiers, landlords, bankers, or lenders. That is why I distinguish between the two, and you may disagree, but it's certainly not moving the goalposts or sneering.