Robber-barons essentially rule
the world. From China to Russia to Japan to India to Europe to
America, there are phony businessmen everywhere you look. These
dictatorial billionaires rob mankind blind.
These ultra-thieves are created by government monopolies of one sort or
another. The criminals use the state to seize control of some extremely important
product or service, so that if the public wants it, as they almost always do, they have to go to
the robber-barons. On top of their exclusive economic niche, many or most of the oligarchs
also receive government subsidies, import protection, and
bureaucratic regulation to keep down competition. There are many
possible names for this planet-wide system of economic tyranny and theft:
crony capitalism, phony capitalism, corporate capitalism, corporatism,
fascism, princely capitalism, corrupt capitalism, counterfeit
capitalism, criminal capitalism, klepto-capitalism, tyrannical
capitalism, and more.
In
1996, President Bill Clinton claimed, "The
era of big government is over."
This was largely based upon the 1980s liberal revolutions led by
Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Mikhail
Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, and Deng
Shiao-ping in
China. It was also based upon the fall of communism in Eastern Europe
in 1989 and the Soviet Union in 1991.
To
many, the 140-year war between capitalism and socialism seemed to be
over. Individualism-based economic
choice had won and collectivism-based economic coercion had lost.
From now on, evidently, it was freedom for all and tyranny for none.
Socialism
had supposedly
been both intellectually
refuted and politically
defeated. So now capitalism
was going to take over the globe. As American intellectual Francis
Fukuyama put it, it was "the
end of history".
The
future would consist solely of political free enterprise, free trade,
and laissez-faire business activity. And along with this economic
liberation
would come social and personal
liberalism. As
Milton Friedman put it in 1980, we were all going to be "free
to choose".
Of
course, none of that happened. The post-1991 worldwide welfare state
grew bigger and nastier than ever. This is because however much
people wanted and needed individual liberty, the finest economic,
social, and political theorists of that era understood freedom and
individualism about as well as an aardvark understands calculus.
And
under the advice of their illiberal, nitwit, dirtbag, Western brothers, the
backward Chinese, Russians, Indians, and everyone else "liberated"
their
societies by selling off government businesses and granting economic
monopolies to the politically connected and criminally corrupt. Virtually never were these giant commercial interests sold freely and honestly to the
highest bidder with the proceeds going to the people. And as
these new and terrible plutocrats were created in the East, the Western robber-barons of the
past three decades expanded their power and wealth too.
So
here we are. This is Planet Oligarchy. Outside of relatively small pockets in
the West, there’s hardly a single legitimate billionaire anywhere.
They
virtually all have government regulation, protection, and monopoly on
their side. These coercive advantages let them
steal and dictate on the grand scale. These robber-barons bribe the
rulers almost without limit, and often effectively become
the leaders too.
Capitalism
is nowhere to be found. Liberty has no national home. And the greatest
geniuses and heroes of Harvard,
Yale, Princeton, Oxford, Cambridge, and the like still
understand economic, social, and political
liberalism
less than the poor aardvark mentioned above.
Crony
"capitalism"
is
the political
system found in every nation on earth. And
robber-barons pretty much rule the whole world.