Sep 29, 2026 · 55 min · 14 segments
This week I sat down with economic historian Patrick Newman of the University of Tampa and Rothbard Fellow at the Mises Institute. We talk about the rise of crony capitalism, why DOGE and the GOP…
Patrick NewmanGuestPeter St. OngeHostRecently, there's been a slew of polls showing millennials and Gen Z think that capitalism is broken, by which, of course, they mean the crony corruption that is dominating our economy.
you bring up a very important point that more and more people think that socialism is a good idea and that capitalism is a bad idea.
And this, of course, is tragic with literally life or death consequences because people's anger is misplaced.
which is the system of various types of special interest policies that harm the public.
So these are special privileges like subsidies and regulatory barriers to entry and so on that cause a lot of the problems people are upset with.
And people blame capitalism for problems X, Y, and Z, but they don't realize that it's actually cronyism is what they should be upset at.
And this is something that has taken decades, if not hundreds of years to establish.
And And the book that I wrote is on the corporate estate, which is a system of government-sponsored cartels and monopolies.
On the free market under capitalism, cartels and monopolies, which restrict supply and raise price, those are actually very hard to achieve because you always have internal pressure of existing competition and external pressure of new competition.
But when the government gets involved, when they provide subsidies to large businesses or favored business groups, when they institute various anti-competitive regulations, anti-price cutting regulations, they institute barriers to entry, so on and so forth.
Now you have a government sponsored cartel and monopoly and the chance of success is much higher.
And it's important to trace the history of this system of cronyism and its evolution, because this is really, I think, the most successful way of being able to convince people that, hey, don't get upset at capitalism, get upset at cronyism.
Recently, there's been a slew of polls showing millennials and Gen Z think that capitalism is broken, by which, of course, they mean the crony corruption that is dominating our economy.
you bring up a very important point that more and more people think that socialism is a good idea and that capitalism is a bad idea.
And this, of course, is tragic with literally life or death consequences because people's anger is misplaced.
which is the system of various types of special interest policies that harm the public.
So these are special privileges like subsidies and regulatory barriers to entry and so on that cause a lot of the problems people are upset with.
And people blame capitalism for problems X, Y, and Z, but they don't realize that it's actually cronyism is what they should be upset at.
And this is something that has taken decades, if not hundreds of years to establish.
And And the book that I wrote is on the corporate estate, which is a system of government-sponsored cartels and monopolies.
On the free market under capitalism, cartels and monopolies, which restrict supply and raise price, those are actually very hard to achieve because you always have internal pressure of existing competition and external pressure of new competition.
But when the government gets involved, when they provide subsidies to large businesses or favored business groups, when they institute various anti-competitive regulations, anti-price cutting regulations, they institute barriers to entry, so on and so forth.
Now you have a government sponsored cartel and monopoly and the chance of success is much higher.
And it's important to trace the history of this system of cronyism and its evolution, because this is really, I think, the most successful way of being able to convince people that, hey, don't get upset at capitalism, get upset at cronyism.
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