> "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche.
There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc...
Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
>Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail.
I argue that it's a fundamental defect, an architectural one, and it won't be solved with infinite patches and workarounds.
You can patch a defective design until it's somewhat functional, but it will never compare to a properly architected design. In the case of economics, we need to consciously choose what we want to incentivize based on how we want society to look and function.
>Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps.
This is the MAGA argument: "things were better in the old days". This is an appeal to false nostalgia and does not hold up to scrutiny. It also ignores the fact that every successful small company eventually becomes a big company.
Even in the days of small/pastoral/cottage capitalism there existed the same problems we have now, just more isolated and harder to root out because they were very numerous and too widely distributed. Abuse was very common, and any complaints were dismissed as "just the way things are" or countered with "then start your own business" or "get rich enough so you don't have to participate" or "you're gay/black/foreign so you should be thankful for a job" or simply "you deserve it because <X>". These things eventually improved, but every improvement was paid for in blood.
One worker at some 'ma and pa' business cannot effectively unionize, and has little bargaining power. In very small communities where everyone knew each other that worker may have more leverage by way of putting community relationships on the line (if they had some social power), but it never seemed to stop individual business owners from eventually buying up entire towns and running roughshod over the population.
Recent history and contemporary life is full of examples of this sort of thing — towns where everyone works at the same lumber mill or factory owned by That One Guy Who Lives In A Huge Mansion On The Hill. Now it's a Wal-Mart or Amazon fulfillment center owned by One Corporation that's distributed and faceless.
Companies are effectively dictatorships. Workers have little say in how a company is run, except in cases where they rebel against the system and go outside of it to redress their grievances.
Even then, this redress has never changed the fundamental relationship between worker and capitalist: the worker will always be a subject, because there is no democracy in the workplace.
It really amazes me how people can simultaneously support democracy and capitalism (dictatorship).
>The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
Even 'small capitalism' promotes severely undesirable incentives at its core, which appear at all levels of scaling. Can you provide an example of where it doesn't, or show that socialism/communism/whatever is just as bad?
I think you've misinterpreted me. I'm not a capitalists apologists, I just acknowledge the difference between theory and implementation.
Capitalism as a theory does promote undesirable incentives, that's why I wrote "it promotes the 'bad' parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc..." I think you also missed where I wrote "You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business." I thought I was implying it with 'ma and pa shops' but perhaps I should have used more exact numbers: capping the number of employees to 10 and then limiting the radius of business to 5 miles would make businesses so numerous, small, and presumably with a low enough startup cost that "disgruntled employees" could realistically strike it out on their own. Also, I only suggested the capping/geographical limiting as an idea/example. It's easy to imagine other ideas for discouraging the "bad" parts of capitalism, like forcing a wage ratio, e.g. the CEO cannot make more than 10 times what their average worker makes.
I never watch news so I cannot comment on anything topical. My thoughts are my own. If something I wrote has some sort of political connotations to current goings-on, then that's coincidence.
Personally, I dream of a Star Trek-ien utopia that promotes a pro-work culture with no money, no copyrights, no intellectual property, offers equal opportunity, and utilizes technology - like AI - to free folks to pursue a more meaningful existence. People should democratically vote on the services they want - food and shelter being the most obvious - and if there aren't enough volunteers for these services, then you conscript them. My thinking is if the military can conscript people to fight wars, then certainly you can conscript people to perform economic work; especially since it would be work that the majority democratically voted for! Everything we have today is because people built it; under the implementation I'm proposing we can still have everything - people just have to be willing to work for it in the absence of the "bad" parts of human nature. I'm not naïve enough to believe the implementation I'm describing would be immune to problems. At the end of the day, people have to "believe" in the system and want to make it work.
There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc...
Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.