Pelosi: A Crony Cries Capitalism!

A common smear against capitalism today is the self-contradictory phrase crony capitalism, which wrongly packages together government favoritism (made possible by the misuse of government to influence trade) with free markets.

As would be readily apparent to any reader of Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, government favors would be impossible under actual capitalism. This is because in that system, there is a separation of state and economics.

This person does not have the right to coercively change the value of a stock, and then exchange that stock for money with those who do not know about it. Nobody has that "right." (Image by John Harrington, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.)

It is not under capitalism that cronyism can exist, and it is not under capitalism that we live today. We live under an increasingly government-controlled mixed economy.

It is when a person like Nancy Pelosi squeals about her "rights" under "capitalism" -- presumably entailing her being able to buy and sell stocks in companies that she can regulate -- that we can see the full disingenuousness of that term: She knows that many Americans view capitalism favorably in practical terms and that many more view individuals as having rights. And she knows that what she is doing is anything but the same as regular Americans buying and selling stocks.

And so we have capitalism being used to hide cronyism, rather than the usual guilt by false association, which usually is used to justify the likes of Pelosi running everything.

And yet she fascistically violates our rights every day when she legislates to tell businessmen how they are to run their businesses, i.e., she disposes of the property and time of others. She does this and then buys and sells stocks in those very companies. Whether she has just helped or hindered those businesses, her stock trading takes advantage of the ignorance of others.

It is not capitalism for the government to order businesses around, and it is immoral and (should be) illegal to acquire money or property under false pretenses -- as she does when trading with anyone ignorant of what she has just done.

If Pelosi were serious about her profession of allegiance to capitalism, she would (a) immediately begin taking legislative steps to untangle government from business, (b) place her own holdings in a blind trust, (c) work to make it illegal for anyone meanwhile in a position to influence winners and losers to trade stocks, and (d) apologize.

I am not holding my breath.

Nancy Pelosi is no capitalist, but she is definitely a crony, and there is no such thing as a right to be a crony.

-- CAV