Crony capitalism

To the CEOs of the major AI companies who have told us recently that they are concerned about the dangers inherent in the technology-

Okay, there's a handful, [clears throat] couple in particular, most of which are left-wing Democrats, and this is what we've called here, and I wrote about in Liberty and Tyranny, crony capitalism.

That is when big companies go to the government for regulations that they claim are for safety and security and health and so forth and so on, when in fact, the purpose of the regulations is to create an oligopoly, if not a monopoly.

That is, to eliminate all competition from smaller companies.

And that's such an interesting dynamic from kind of the soul of a country perspective, but also from what is palatable or what is acceptable from a capitalism and a political perspective that maybe you could walk through the listeners a little bit about how that turn happened and what it looks like today.

Well, it's funny that you mentioned capitalism because what an oligarchy is at the end of the day is a monopolistic crony capitalism.

It's not market liberalism.

It's not an open economy.

A monopolist's dream is to have a government grant it an exclusive monopoly over an industry.

There are many examples of crony capitalism in action.

However, one historical example proves particularly interesting, for it shines a light on just how far monopolists are willing to go to acquire such government privilege.

The event in question is the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

This is the industry trying to get ahead of things and secure p- uh, uh, legislation that'll protect it from the liability they otherwise would face like every other company in the world.

world.See? And that's crony capitalism-

Oh, yeah

... not capitalism.

This is lunacy." But we don't have free market capitalism.

What we have is crony capitalism, and what we've just been talking about is that they, uh, the legislate...

Uh, we know we live in an oligarchy because n- uh, as the Princeton study proved in 2015, if you are in the bottom 90% of wage earners, no matter who you vote for, your wishes are never reflected back in legislation.

But if you're in the top 10% of wage ear- then you do have...