Crony Baloney
15th May 2023
With the recent irresponsible bank bailouts by the U.S. government and culture war over Bud Light, American capitalism seems to have gone off the rails. However, there’s a method to the madness. These shenanigans are symptoms of an underlying malady. It goes by various names—crony capitalism, ESG, woke capital—but its essence is simple: cool, calculating deals between elites to maximize wealth and power.
Standard economics provides the interpretive key. All we must do is take the toolkit economists use to analyze “private” choice, such as exchange in markets, and apply it to “public” choice, namely politics. Collective action is absolutely a forum for exchange. Representatives from Podunk and Decadentapolis logroll to get each other’s bills passed. Bureaucrats from the Department of Mission Creep and the Micromanagement Agency trade influence and favors to acquire larger budgets. It’s exchange all the way down. Crony-wokeism is no exception.