PJ Media

Thanks, Runey.

The Peter Schiff blockquote explicitly mentions crony capitalism. Aside from that, implicit in advocacy for free markets is an end to state favoritism toward certain actors in the economy.

That said, when you say “corporation influence IN the government,” I imagine you mean more than favoritism. I imagine you mean the ability of corporations to participate in the political process. If so, any “omission” on my part is due to a fundamental disagreement on the nature of speech and its free exercise. I don’t think lobbying is evil in and of itself. I don’t think campaign contributions are evil in and of themselves. The problem is not that there’s too much money in politics. The problem is that government is empowered to do things it has no business doing. Were government confined to its sole purpose of protecting individual rights, there would be much less for corporations to buy with their lobbyists. Elections would no longer be a contest for control of a club with which to legally bludgeon the competition – economic or political.

You and I also appear to have a fundamental disagreement about the role of credit default swaps and other derivative instruments. I omit it because I find it irrelevant. You might as well blame sports betters for the outcome of a game. The price of these instruments signaled what was happening. It didn’t cause it to happen. The fact people bet against borrowers only demonstrates that they were intelligent enough to see the forest from the trees. What would you have had them do? What power did speculators have to make sub-prime loans serviceable?