One of the many pro-capitalist right-wing memes that you see floating around the Internet is this:

“Crony capitalism is different from real capitalism.”

I think you already know what crony capitalism is, but, basically, it just means there’s a close relationship between the capitalist class and important government officials to the extent that the government stops working for the people and instead functions primarily to make the capitalist class richer while the working class gets poorer.

In practice, the way this works is that the capitalist bribes the politician, and the politician returns the favor by pushing legislation, executive orders, or legal decisions that favor the capitalist (usually in the form of regulations). The bribe can be an illegal bribe, but it can also come in various legal forms:

• Campaign donations
• Promise of employment at the end of the politician’s political career
• Direct production of marketing materials that directly or indirectly support the politician’s campaign
• Donations to a PAC that directly or indirectly supports the politician’s campaign
• Employment of a family member (including jobs where there is no work)
• Donation to a family member’s charitable organization
• Relocating jobs to the politician’s constituent’s region
• Buying the politician’s crypto currency (which the politician can cash out later)
• Promoting the politician on the capitalist’s media platform (e.g., a newspaper or social media site)
• Providing infrastructure for the capitalist’s facilities

In essence, the politician stops being a leader or public servant and, instead, becomes a tool used by the capitalist to manipulate the government. This is an example of how money is a kind of power and can be coercive and destructive to society. The politician in this scenario no longer protects their working class constituents from the capitalist and instead protects the capitalists from the working class.

This problem is real. For example, the whole reason Americans have to do their taxes every year is because companies that sell tax preparation services have bribed politicians into requiring that long and complicated procedure. The government already knows what you owe and could calculate it for you. Cigarette manufacturers managed to bribe politicians to focus on the flammability of furniture (so furniture manufacturers were forced to use fire-resistant materials that were chemically dangerous to people) instead of being held responsible for producing the product most likely to start a house fire. The mere existence of a complex regulation makes it harder for small businesses to compete with a huge capitalist corporation that can hire someone to take care of compliance; the government could take care of that bureaucratic piece for the small business, but they don’t.

Unfortunately, this is how the US government was originally set up to work. When the framers of the Constitution were thinking about “minority protections” they meant the opulent minority. The opulent minority were the relatively wealthy, educated, land-owning white men who had de-facto control of the American colonies before the United States was formally created. While we managed to fix a lot of things about that original situation (e.g., slavery has been ended, women can vote), we didn’t fix it enough, and now the gap between the wealthy elite and working class is greater than at any other time in US history.

How do we fix it?

The obvious answer would be to make all those activities in the bulleted list above illegal. We would have the government fund campaigns directly so that no private money would get into the mix. Politicians and capitalists who take part in any kind of bribery (including tricky things like cushy post-career jobs) would be severely punished. It would be a game of whack-a-mole, but it would ultimately work. Another approach is to use a combination of income tax and wealth tax to incrementally shrink the power of the capitalist class until their influence on government is more reasonable. There may be other solutions.

Clearly, capitalists and their fans hate the ideas I just described above. Instead, these people claim that all regulation is crony regulation, and that all governments are crony governments. Further, they claim that capitalism is the only workable economic system, and that limiting what a capitalist does with their money (e.g., banning campaign donations) is a violation of their fundamental freedom (even though freedom to buy what you want is not part of the Constitution). Therefore, their answer is to get rid of the government and let the capitalists freely do capitalism. To put it another way, they claim there should be no limit on the power of the capitalist other than the free market because the existence of a government is just too much of a temptation for the worst capitalists and politicians, so corruption is inevitable as long as a government exists. In truth, the free market is a relatively good way to determine which goods should be produced but a poor way to regulate power.

One good outcome to abolishing the government might be that the government could no longer be blamed for the failures and abuses of the capitalist class, but, really, this argument really boils down to one of the most popular right-wing argumentation strategies:

“Good is the real evil.”

You’ve seen this in various formats: “Selfishness is a virtue because selflessness is the real vice” or “Antifascists are the real fascists”.

The United States of America has been an anocracy for a long time. An anocracy is a government that claims to be a democracy, and may have the trappings of democracy, but that does not function as a democracy. Under an anocracy, a group of oligarchs are pulling the strings of the government and it primarily works to serve their needs. The important advantage of doing it this way over the oligarchs having direct, naked control of the government is that they can always blame the government when things go wrong. When the working class picks up the torches and pitchforks, they go after the politicians instead of the men behind the curtain.

However, on a day-to-day basis, the important thing is that this relationship allows capitalists to externalize some expenses. For example, the capitalist can bribe the politician into building out the infrastructure necessary for the capitalists’ latest facility, and the politician then claims that they have done this to bring jobs to the region. NASA is a great example of this; they developed a whole slew of amazing technologies and then just gave them away to the private sector. There’s this common thing in government called an “Office of Technology Transfer” whose whole job is to give technologies that were developed using public money away for free to private companies. The police are great example of this as well; most protection of private wealth is performed by the police, and the primary job of the police is to protect capitalist property, but in the meantime, the police are funded by taxes on the working class. The greatest government-facilitated externalization of costs is climate change — somehow, fossil fuel corporations are not responsible for this, so we have to pay for it with tax dollars and those companies get to keep on polluting.

For these reasons, in the past, the capitalists and their fans have always been lying about wanting to get rid of the government. Like so many right-wing arguments, this argument was not sincere. Government has been truly beneficial to them, after all. What they really want is to minimize the parts of government that hinder the capitalist from getting richer (relative to the working class). So, they don’t want to get rid of taxes — they want to get rid of taxes for the rich. They don’t want to get rid of financial regulation — they just want to change the regulations so that they can externalize financial catastrophes to the working class. They don’t want to get rid of DEI — they just want to provide DEI to the groups they like (which isn’t usually the groups who need it).

But I did say, “in the past.” Things are changing!

Certain elements of the capitalist elite (e.g. the tech bros) are attempting to move to a post-crony-capitalist world where the government would be substantially diminished and these elites would control their own walled cities guarded by mercenaries (Trump has been calling these “Freedom Cities”). Each city would be its own corporation and living there would require that you have a contract with that corporation. If they decide they don’t need you, your contract is not renewed and you have to leave. Since the capitalists control all the resources in this scenario, leaving is a bad thing. This is essentially the “Mad Max” scenario where you’ve got little city states like Gas Town, the Bullet Farm, and the Citadel; you might be able to exist in the wasteland in between, but it won’t be a good time.

The interesting thing about this is that corporations have internal governments. Really, this entire idea that started with, “Crony capitalism is different from real capitalism,” is just a strategy to replace the relatively democratic government of a republic with the completely authoritarian government of a corporation. It’s moving us from the frying pan and into the fire. For example, right now, there are regulations that effectively reduce the amount of discrimination corporations can engage in based on sex, but in this new world, the existence of such protection is entirely dependent on the whims of the CEO and/or board of directors. This scheme does depend on the capitalists having unimpeded control of resources (via the fiction of ownership and/or contracts), but they believe that they’ve nearly achieved that, and they believe they need the bunker-like protection of a walled city to protect them from the future.

There is no such thing as “getting rid of the government”*. Our choice is between building a government that works for all (and does not rule over us) versus building a government that only works for the opulent minority (while it oppresses everyone else). We don’t need a future where capitalists are free. We need a future where working class people — the individuals who are doing the work — are free.

I’m always interested in why it is that people believe things like, “Crony capitalism is different from real capitalism.” Here’s my take:

First off, decades of propaganda have reduced what Americans are able to imagine. When someone says, “communism,” or, “socialism,” most Americans can only imagine the bogeyman version of the Soviet Union; they cannot accept that a leftist government can be structured however we like. When someone says, “anarchy,” most Americans automatically assume a violently chaotic world. Second, while the problems with capitalism are obvious to everyone, most Americans are highly motivated to come up with excuses for it because they are so afraid of the left. They’ve been convinced that capitalism is the best possible system and that human beings are inherently evil. Americans are quite literally afraid of people who want to build a better world… because, you see, good is the real evil.

*Note: Anarchists want to get rid of the government, but they mean “government” in the specific sense of an elite that rules over everyone else; they understand that you need a system of organization and resource allocation, but they want a system that is democratic (preferably a consensus democracy) and mutually beneficial to all.