The Ridiculous Irony of “Crony Capitalism”
There are many people who laugh at the premise that “real communism has never been tried,” and rightfully so. However simultaneously hold the conflicting belief that all the flaws of capitalism can be reduced to “crony capitalism” or even outright say that “real capitalism has never been tried.”
While many do not admit this fact, there is indeed a power vacuum in libertarian societies, wherein the only two sources of authority that can be used to fill the vacuum lies in either the private or public sector. These sources of power are corporations and governments respectively.
Democratic societies without a strong corporate hegemony will likely develop into a governmental dictatorship. Likewise, the existence of corporate hegemonies can lead to collusion between said corporations and the state. This often develops into a causality dilemma concerning whether crony capitalism or governmental intervention existed first. That is to say, did crony capitalism cause governmental intervention or did governmental intervention cause crony capitalism?
This begs the question, is “real capitalism” a theoretical construct (like communism) or a practicable long term economic solution suitable given the imperfect nature of human beings.
The Inevitability of Quid-Pro-Quo
In order to better understand the mechanisms that facilitates collusion between corporations and governments, we must first understand the nature of quid-pro-quo and whether it can ever be effective mitigated.
Who lobbies the government? Who accepts campaign contributions? Who creates laws preventing this from happening? Could it be possible that the same people who are being lobbied are writing laws supposedly “preventing” themselves from being lobbied? Does this make sense?
The truth is that a voluntary free-market can exist if and only if there exists no government or if there exists no imperfect people in positions of power. Both of which are idealistic and often confined to ephemeral, transitional stages of society.
Conclusion
Yes, PragerU can rant all day about “crony capitalism” without stipulating even a hint of how to mitigate this issue. This is fairly understandable since capitalism inevitably declines into crony-capitalism, just like how communism always declines into poverty and totalitarianism.
Throughout history, when public institutions became corrupt, they’re either forcefully expelled by the masses through violent revolution or collapse under their own weight. Revolution is not a bad thing in of itself. It however can be hijacked by modern theories such as communism and socialism. This often (always) creates a worse-off society than even that of crony-capitalism.
Given the cyclic nature of civilization, it follows that all forms of government will eventually collapse as new ones rise. Neither capitalism, socialism nor communism are exceptions to this rule. A meritocratic or hierarchical aristocracy can exist independently (as it had for thousands of years before the creation of) the aforementioned modern economic theories.