The Coda V.1
Falling real wages and rising hours, a crumbling middle class and depressed workers. Yet the richest are richer than ever before, and get ever richer still. Endless wars of greed, environmental destruction, and loss of human freedoms. How did we come to this point? ‘Capitalism’, or ‘the free market’, has not created this outcome. As an economic model to promote innovation and wealth generation, we have none better than capitalism at present.
One significant reason why we face this outcome is that a small but powerful proportion of citizens game our system. They sell dreams, but prevent a free market. They sell fear, yet create conflicts. They are powerful, and grow ever more powerful as they suck up a disproportionate and obscene level of wealth. They have gamed the system by securing both indirect and direct control of our political and socio-economic systems. We now live in the age of ‘crony capitalism’. At a distance we citizens appear to enjoy a free economic and political market place, but this is a daily illusion.
Crony capitalism describes the distortion of government and its structures by a small proportion of citizens, who use wealth to gain undue influence upon the laws of the nation, for their own benefit and not for that of ordinary tax-paying citizens as whole.
We now see a vast aggregation of wealth concentrated in the hands of a very small proportion of our populations. That small proportion naturally desire to increase their own benefit, but our systems have failed to prevent the resulting cronyism. That natural desire cannot be permitted to warp and pervert the neutrality of the citizens’ government. The citizens’ government operates for the whole nation, not only the wealthiest.
Communism, fascism, and crony capitalism are all equally dangerous. Each ultimately result in control by one dominant group over the vast majority of citizens. The latter do not enjoy the fruits and freedoms created by their work; instead they pass them up to the top of the pyramid. Is this the path to slavery?
Cronyism is the enemy of best progress, best wealth creation, and social freedom. A new and democratic way to prevent cronyism, as well as communism and fascism, is proposed in this essay: the Coda.