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Comment by dingusdew | Hacker News Reader

"Cronyism" is the long-term result of capitalism. It will always result in this type of corruption, it's the nature of an economic system that rewards greed.

Cronyism is just another way to say "Late Stage Capitalism."

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Cronyism is the end stage of everything. All political and economic systems ultimate tend towards dominance by a minority who refuse to lose, and warp the system to suit their interests until they are removed by one means or another. It's a concept so old it even as a word for it: Anacyclosis.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory#Polybius

I see comments like this and I wonder what do people actually learn in school. Adam Smith wrote extensively about this (surely people still learn about him). His premise were people are naturally greedy, and it is good to use a system that pits their greed against each other. A natural competition to provide goods and services to each other. And it has worked well for hundreds of years, pulling billions out of poverty in just the last few decades. But yeah, government corruption is a problem in any economic system and democracy was supposed to be the check against cronyism.

The problem with that naive viewpoint is that it assumes that greedy people that got successful playing the game won't use their power to mess with the rules.

Once the first set of greedy people gets powerful enough, they change the playing field and cement their lead.

75% of those billions pulled out of poverty were in China [0], which is explicitly not capitalist.

[0] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

That report references the last 40 years. The previous comment is in the context of Adam Smith who died over 200 years ago.

Capitalism and democracy are older than the PRC, and the billions aided by it include the entire modern western world.

The previous comment said, and I quote, "pulling billions out of poverty in just the last few decades".

The "last few decades" are around what I would call the last 40 years, wouldn't you agree?

The entire modern western world got rich not through some capitalist miracle, but by brutal imperialism and subjugation of the third world.

My mistake then.

Cronyism is something that will always happen when free markets mix with democracy. In the USA, this started before the end of the first Presidential term. It isn’t new.

All governments suck, all economic systems suck, and it all sucks because people are flawed. We can always try for better, but so far every system that humans design, humans also corrupt and destroy.

I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.

It seems that the fundamental problem is actually humans. If we eliminate the humans, we can eliminate the problems. Maybe AI will accomplish this before long, after it reaches the same conclusion...

> I would argue that we should all stop trying plan the activities of millions.

Not having an economic system sounds impossible. In the absence of a planned system, there would be one that spontaneously emerges, in all likelihood one that's even easier to corrupt.

Not having a government would be more viable, but without a central power we would just revert to "might makes right", which is not so different from cronyism. Not to mention all the problems when infrastructure becomes profit driven or disappears, basic education has to be provided by private teachers, etc.

Interesting, does that mean modern Russia, China, and North Korea can be simply considered the results of Late Stage Socialism?

>"Late Stage Capitalism"

Communist have been claiming to be able to predict the future for the past two centuries. Certainly this time you will get it right?

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