The Sun's not yellow it's chicken

Western Capitalism is something we have to offer to the third world, and maybe after we watch their success we can try capitalism here

augustuscarmichael:

Complaining about “gaming the system” in capitalism is about as futile as complaining about your friend refusing to sell you any of their fuchsia squares in monopoly

Problem: 

It isn’t capitalism.  Capitalism is “The Market Decides” and we both agree that the market isn’t deciding.  What we have is some neo-merchantilism — “Cronie Capitalism.”

A great example is the nation’s wealth.  Trillions of dollars are stored in the form of oil, coal, natural gas… lumber… shale… gold… 

You get the idea.

But what you don’t get is any chance — any chance at all — to hold the lease on any of that.

Nope.

You have to be a cronie.  You must be one of the rich, powerful & corrupt in order to win a valuable oil lease, say.

Now what would an ordinary American do with an oil lease?  I mean, it’s not like we have drilling equipment in our closet, right?  So what would we do with it?

Subcontract.  Sell it.  Hand it over to Exxon or BP for a cut.

Instead, everyone who isn’t already rich and thoroughly corrupt is locked out.  The wealth of the nation flows into the pockets of billionaires, who in turn scream & holler about the selfish poor wanting healthcare. And food…

A better example:  FCC broadcast licenses.

A friend of mine’s dream was to be a discjockey.  Actually, he was a discjockey for a while, but it’s a terrible career path — old timers say you can’t even claim to be experienced until you’ve been fired at least three times — and the industry has been all but swallowed up by huge corporations.

Anyhow, so I ask my friend about starting a radio station.  You know, if working for one is so difficult (or just plain sucks), why not start his own little local station?  Turns out this is something he already thought of and looked into, but…

All the licenses had been allocated.  They only allow so many (non digital) stations — frequencies — so they don’t all overlap, cause interference with each other, and the licenses for all those frequencies had been issued.

But there were no stations.  Not in his home in a sleepy part of Maine.

All those licenses were gobbled up by insiders who sat on them, hoping to extort huge sums of money from anyone who wanted to service the community with a broadcast station. But under all the laws and regulations, the airwaves belong to the public, and such squatting is a violation of the entire purpose behind the licensing to begin with.

This is where it turns from bad to worse…

The government only recently got the idea to PAY these insiders, these thoroughly corrupt cronies, for abusing the system.  They say they need to free up the frequencies for wireless, so they want to buy up the unused frequencies (only unused because the cronies demand enormous tribute from anyone who wants to use them), shoveling untolled riches into the pockets of the already rich.

There.  Now you as the taxpayer are paying corrupt rich people for broadcast frequencies which always belonged to you, just to get them to stop abusing the system, stop withholding what isn’t theirs and they should never have been allowed to sit on in the first place.