Setanta
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Pantheon wrote on Nov 2 nd, 2013 at 8:07pm: So far i've see people being confuse seeing today's Corporatism or Cronyism and mistaking it for capitalism. Quote:Capitalism Isn't Corporatism or Cronyism
In fact, capitalism is the system of rights, liberty, civility, peace and non-sacrificial prosperity; it’s not the system of government that unjustly favors capitalists at others’ expense. It provides a level legal playing field plus officials who serve us as low-profile referees (not arbitrary rule-makers or score-changers). To be sure, capitalism also entails inequality – of ambition, talent, income, or wealth – because that’s how individuals (and firms) really are; they’re unique, not clones or inter-changeable parts, as the egalitarians claim. Capitalism is the political system which ensures that innocent “economic power” (i.e., the power to produce) isn’t mixed with force to become invalid political power (i.e., the power to loot); it’s the system that separates business and state, for the same good reason that it also makes sure to separate church and state. Neither of the two recent political movements – “Occupy Wall Street” or the “Tea Party” – seem to fully grasp this.
Yes, there’s an alternative system that does entail the government unjustly ruling business and government, in turn, improperly controlled by business for business’s exclusive benefit (whether by subsidies, special favors, monopolies and franchises, tax breaks, or bailouts), even as it nominally still permits private property holdings: it’s called “corporatism” (sometimes, synonymously, “cronyism” or “fascism”). Corporatism was the system originated almost a century ago by the American “Progressives,” and later by Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, and Roosevelt in the U.S. (see his 1933 National Recovery Act, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1935 as unconstitutional because it was so corporatist). Corporatism goes hand-in-hand with statism, with abandonment of the fully free economy and adoption of the welfare-warfare state. Yet while many oppose cronyism, corporate welfare, and bailouts, they also endorse handouts to almost everyone else, including to the politically-valuable cronies so easily found among today’s labor union leaders, “green” companies, under-water homeowners, over-indebted college students, and war-happy munitions makers.
In the world today (and for most of the past century) we haven’t had capitalism per se but instead the welfare state and corporatism; we’ve had what are commonly called “mixed economies,” those with some remaining vestiges of capitalist freedom but also many (and fast-proliferating) controls and taxes. Obfuscations about capitalism’s real nature and the blurring of distinctions between the terms capitalism and corporatism make it difficult for most people to discern cause and effect whenever some disaster or corruption arises, and thus it’s difficult to assign proper blame or achieve a lasting remedy. Yet people should always remind themselves that freedom breeds peace, justice, and prosperity, while coercion breeds violence, exploitation and poverty. When a mixed economy fails, it’s not its capitalist aspect that fails – unless you believe freedom itself fails.
Whenever we observe indisputable socio-economic disasters or injustices – in the best recent example, the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the 2008 financial crisis (and TARP bailouts), the sub-prime loan debacle, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, underwater mortgages and defaults, persistently high jobless rates – we shouldn’t waste any time disputing whether they were caused by the freedom or rather the coercion part of the mixed economy. They were caused by the coercive element, not the free one (or from “deregulation”) – and that’s where all remedies must lie. We need more freedoms and less controls. We must identify, locate, and excise all those many government agencies, subsidies, taxes, and regulations that violate our liberties and rights, those that transform officials from mere referees on life’s field into savages running amuck, altering rules and redistributing well-earned points – and thereby wrecking an otherwise perfectly fine and fun game
http://www.forbes.com/sites/richardsalsman/2011/12/07/capitalism-is-decidedly-not-corporatism-or-cronyism/2/ . Your first highlighted: Why does he say it's innocent economic power? I believe he might be making the argument "guns don't kill people, people do" when in reality it's "people with guns that kill people." Either way, how does capitalism restrain greed at the expense of others? There is no "sharing with the tribe" or anything like it in capitalism. Tell me how anything he says shows how capitalism won't produce that which he claims it will prevent? Who will keep this separation of "innocent powers" from corrupt ones like "govt power" or the "power of community" if not economic power? Explain how it is a cuddly teddy bear rather than a voracious world eater? Second highlighted is just unadulterated crap. Government bad, regulation bad, let us help you, give us your world and you will be better off! You can't seriously read this stuff and not see it as apologist material for unfettering the capitalists to do as they want.
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