“The most dangerous enemies of capitalism today are capitalists,” says Timothy P. Carney. “This is becoming clearer every day to people committed to free markets.”
The conservative and libertarian grassroots came to deeply distrust big business after the Wall Street bailouts and Obama’s stimulus and health care bills, both of which had big-business backing. Tea Party ire focused on subsidy-suckling businesses as much as at big-spending politicians.
Beltway conservatives have also joined in the fight against corporatism. Last spring, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation all lined up against the Chamber of Commerce and pressed GOP congressmen to vote to kill the Export-Import Bank, which nonetheless was reauthorized by an overwhelming margin.
Republican politicians, despite being lobbied hard by their big-business donors and K Street advisers, are nevertheless moving slowly away from corporate welfare and toward free-market populism. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan wrote an op-ed in Forbes in 2009 titled “Down with Big Business” (a headline he borrowed from a 1979 Wall Street Journal op-ed).
And now academia’s free-market players are getting in on the game, beginning to rebuild the intellectual infrastructure to argue against corporatism. George Mason University’s Mercatus Center this week is kicking off a series of papers on cronyism and business-government collusion.
