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Comment by bfe | Hacker News Reader

Just last week, Elon argued against a different legal monopoly, for national security launch services by the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture. [1]

It's amazing how much building a new company in a supposedly free market requires arguing against politicians who claim to champion free market economics, but who actually use government to give cushy monopolies to incumbents with big lobbying budgets.

"Crony capitalism" isn't an accurate term for this; it's more like economic central planning by way of lobbyists instead of communist bureaus.

1. http://www.spacex.com/press/2014/03/05/elon-musks-statement-...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-05/musk-makes-washingt...

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Why isn't Crony Capitalism an accurate term for this? Seems like exactly the term to me.

Let's just play economist and call it http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

> In public choice theory, rent-seeking is spending wealth on political lobbying to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating wealth. The effects of rent-seeking are reduced economic efficiency through poor allocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, national decline, and income inequality. Current studies of rent-seeking focus on the manipulation of regulatory agencies to gain monopolistic advantages in the market while imposing disadvantages on competitors.

The term "rent-seeking" is accurate within the study of economics, but is bound not to be understood accurately by lots of non-economists. It resembles a competing, everyday meaning that is inocuous: buying a property or other asset and renting it out is a valuable service, whereas "rent-seeking" is destructive. The term is economists' jargon that euphemizes the problem. If I were the chief of the rent-seeking lobby, I would want everyone to keep calling it "rent-seeking."

The term "economic central planning" emphasizes that it's fundamentally opposite to free market economics, and that its practitioners and defenders are hypocrites.

Except that the terms "economic central planning" and "rent seeking" are orthogonal, even if the results are the same. You could, in theory, have economic central planning without rent seeking -- though it may not work that way in practice.

I think the above poster had it correct; refer to it as "crony capitalism" to non-economists.

"crony capitalism" is just regular capitalism.

Because it's all crony, no capitalism.

> Because it's all crony, no capitalism.

Well, except that it demonstrates exactly the characteristics of the system in which the holders of capital hold society captive to their interests which led to its criticism by the people who coined the term "capitalism" for that system.

it's all crony, no capitalism

crony capitalism == crony "capitalism"

Americans are just lousy with punctuation.

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