Posts tagged with: Crony capitalism

Acton’s director of research, Samuel Gregg, is looking ahead to a post-Obama economy. He notes that every presidency has problems it leaves behind upon exiting the White House, but we have some major economic and moral obstacles to overcome.

Gregg outlines the challenges: mounting debt, entitlement programs that keep growing, crony capitalism, unemployment. What to do?

Doing nothing isn’t an option for American conservatives. I’d suggest, however, that the incremental approach generally followed by conservatives—which often amounts to trying to adjust, rather than override or completely dispense with, policies enacted by progressives—isn’t going to be enough either. Conservatives are instinctively wary of major upheavals. Yet if they really believe that progressive economic policies are seriously damaging the common good, they should perhaps do what progressives do: implement fundamental changes.

(more…)

U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, in an article for www.mlive.com, discussed the recent charter expiration of the Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and how that is a good first-step toward reducing the corporate welfare and crony capitalism that has infected American politics and economics:

If a man swipes your wallet, he’s a thief. We don’t ask whether the pickpocket ultimately spent the cash on a worthy cause. Yet, supporters of corporate welfare would have you believe that as long as the companies receiving welfare prosper, you shouldn’t care that the government snatched your money to make it happen.

The moral implications of cronyism are abundant. As public/private partnerships expand, the market system slowly transforms from free enterprise and competition driven by market forces to government control of who succeeds and fails based on loans or bailouts to favored groups and corporations. In an interview with the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, Peter Schweizer discussed how cronyism is creating a moral crisis and how it is affecting the poor:

Our poverty programs get distorted by crony corporations. Just look at how the food stamp program has expanded over the years. Initially, it was a safety net to provide basic provisions, and most people agree basic safety nets are needed. The problem is that when the government started throwing around billions of dollars, the snack food and soft drink industry saw dollar signs. So they lobbied and got the regulations changed so that snack food and sodas are now covered by government assistance. It’s now a $10 billion industry for soft drink companies. Then it got expanded to include convenience stores, and now you’ve got the fast food industry lobbying lawmakers to let people use EBT cards at fast food establishments.

(more…)

On this week’s edition of Radio Free Acton, we talk with Timothy P. Carney of the Washington Examiner and the American Enterprise Institute about whether or not Big Business is good for economic freedom. Spoiler alert: it’s problematic.

We also talk with Michael Van Beek of the Mackinac Center, our co-sponsors for Carney’s recent lecture at Acton’s Mark Murray Auditorium, and find out a bit about what our fellow Michigan think-tankers are up to over at their headquarters in Midland.

Listen via the audio player below:

Both my parents grew up in Detroit, and my childhood was filled with great trips to visit family for holidays and in the summer. The downtown Hudson’s store was always a destination. One of my aunts worked there, and it was the place to shop. Our trips always included a stop for a Sander’s hot fudge ice cream puff as well. My sisters and I played endless games on the stoop of my grandmother’s home, and a few miles away, rode bikes up and done sidewalks neighborhood sidewalks with our cousins.

That Detroit doesn’t exist anymore. What was once a thriving and beautiful Midwestern city is now a place struggling to remake itself. Harry Veryser, economist and professor at University of Detroit Mercy, has a few ideas as to how Detroit just might make a comeback, and why it ended up the way it is now.

In the following clip from the PovertyCure series, Doug Seebeck explains how U.S. agricultural subsidies have significant negative consequences both at home and abroad — misaligning human action, distorting market signals, and diminishing opportunities for the least of these.

Haiti used to be self-sufficient in rice. Now they get all their rice from the U.S. This is what we do to Africa. We subsidize our agriculture. We overproduce. Then we ship it as aid with a handshake, and we put them out of business. We disempower them. But you’re also putting the U.S. small farmer out of business. And it gets bigger and bigger and you’re squeezing out free enterprise….

How do I best love my neighbor in this rapidly integrating world…so that everybody has the ability to have what I have? It doesn’t mean we give it away. It means allowing them to succeed.

(more…)

The topic of economic inequality continues to be at the forefront of our current political discussions, thanks in no small part by a president who calls it “the defining challenge of our time.”

But although such concerns are more typically lobbed about rather carelessly and thoughtlessly — cause folks to fret over the “power” of small business owners and entrepreneurs in a mythological zero-sum market ecosystem — there are indeed scenarios in which the rise of such inequality ought to give us pause.

In his book Integrated Justice and Equality: Biblical Wisdom for Those Who Do Good Works, John Teevan challenges those former assumptions, noting the dangers of observing inequality at the surface (“the rich get richer!”) and the destruction of knee-jerk redistributionist policies. Yet he also duly recognizes that what lies beneath that surface can sometimes be rather nasty indeed.

We may not live in the landed aristocratic context of the French Revolution, but distortions to market forces are increasingly promoted, leading to lots of tiny barriers over the long run. When passed and implemented, these are bound to trap the downtrodden and further insulate the rich and powerful. Where the “rich get richer” in this type of setting, problems surely abound. (more…)

This week on Radio Free Acton, Michael Matheson Miller continues his conversation with David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English at Yale University, on the thought of Edmund Burke. Bromwich is the author of The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, the first volume of what will be a two-volume intellectual biography of Burke. We kick off this portion of the conversation with some analysis of Burke’s position on free markets and crony capitalism..

To listen to Part 2 of Miller’s interview with Bromwich, use the audio player below; Part 1 is available here.