Much has been made recently of the rich gaming the system for their own benefit. Of a new “guilded age.” Socialist economist Thomas Piketty’s new book has been getting rave reviews from all over the establishment because it makes the case that very powerful people with nearly bottomless bank accounts have gamed the system and that government induced redistribution is in order. And indeed the rich have gamed the system for their benefit, but as Matthew Continetti points out in the attached article, the game the super rich want to play for the most part is not one of free markets and open competition, but one of crony capitalism. The super rich overwhelmingly support statism. For every David Koch writing checks there are 10 crony capitalists with pens in their hands writing checks to politicians who will pass laws which benefit the crony capitalists. Why is it that Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, and George Soros, all broadly support statism? Why is it that they want more regulation? Could it be that more government pads their bottom line? For instance Warren Buffett owns, through Berkshire Hathaway, GEICO, aka Government Employees Insurance Company. Almost every federal employee has GEICO. (I know because I used to sell it to them in college.) What do you think the chances are that the feds would ever in some crazy circumstance let GEICO die? About 0 chance. Nice property to have. Mostly upside with an implicit government guarantee in the event something completely unforeseen happens. This is how the big crony game is played. The statists control the media, the universities, the levers of bureaucratic government, the Senate, the presidency, the banks (in very large part), the Federal Reserve, many of the think tanks, much if not most of the billionaire money, the unions, the schools through teacher unions, and Harry Reid goes on the floor and calls a private citizen “un-American” because that citizen funds the effort to get government out of people’s lives? What kind of insanity is that? (From The Washington Free Beacon): Not a single one of the top “all-time” institutional donors between 1989 and 2014 tilted Republican, according to a list compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics againstcronycapitalism.org/…/why-do-nearly-all-…/
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 23:56:40 +0000
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