It's Time to Rethink Crony Capitalism

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American Thinker
David S. D'Amato
Dec. 6, 2017

The Niskanen Center’s Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles have been making the rounds of late, promoting their new book The Captured Economy. In it, Teles, who teaches political science at Johns Hopkins University, and Lindsey, a long-time think-tanker whose previous experience includes several years at the Cato Institute, argue “the powerful have rigged the economic game in their favor.”

This “folk theory of inequality,” they write, is not “the ranting of ignorant rubes,” but is rather closer to the mark than many sophisticates on both the left and the right would like to admit. Even if grassroots populism has it wrong about the “specific mechanisms” through which elites enrich themselves, its account is “at least aiming in the right direction.”

The authors’ acknowledgment that government is actively tipping the scales in favor of the rich and their economic interests is refreshing. Pundits on the political left demonize the rich but believe that government is the answer, a benign tool for promoting more equitable economic outcomes. And the political right tends to defend the rich as having simply won by serving consumers and working efficiently in the competitions of the free market. Lindsey and Teles say both these accounts are wrong (or at least only partially right). They believe the state and big business are, more often than not, working together against equality and free-market principles.

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