I keep hearing the notion that capitalism itself is wonderful and the pitfalls of our system today are because of crony capitalism. Supposedly, if we had real, pure capitalism, everything would be hunky-dory.
I’m no socialist but I find that argument naive. How do you prevent capitalism from progressing to crony capitalism?
The point of the distinction is to clarify the problem, not to say it's easy to decouple top-down crony capitalism from a more bottom-up free market capitalism.
You can also ask the same question from the other direction:
How do you expect expanding/centralizing political power not to progress into crony capitalism?
There are ideas about what to do but it's a tough political problem.
There is too much disagreement, ambiguity, and complacency about legislation to hold crooked politicians and rent seeking firms accountable to the satisfaction of those that see a problem with it.
So the first step is to spread awareness of the distinction so there is enough political pressure to counter it.
