Saturday, November 26, 2011

OWS do not get it

The OWS people do not get it.  Their problem (everyone's problem) is with crony capitalism.   The bad guys of Wall Street owe their survival to their friends in Washington.  Fred Siegel makes this point in this morning's WSJ.

Confusions like this (over Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism and the economics of growth and prosperity) were nicely sorted out by William Baumol, Robert Litan and Carl Schramm.  But the ignorance of the crowd reverts to a sort of zero-sum stale Marxism.

What do China and the U.S. have in common?  Each is mired in their own crony capitalism.  Today's WSJ also has a piece on the "princelings" of China, the Children of the Revolution.

This Ngram shows that the term "crony capitalism" did not take off until the second Clinton term and peaked in the early Bush years.  Ngram only goes to 2008 so we do not yet know whether there has been a comeback in the Obama years.  I'll bet there has.

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Dear Left ...