Occupy Wall Street & Capitalism: A Professor’s Response
The Occupy Wall Street movement expresses valid frustrations, but do the protesters aim their accusations in the wrong direction?
Economics Professor Chris Coyne draws the distinction between crony capitalism and legitimate capitalism. Crony capitalism is government favoritism fueled by handouts and is responsible for the plight of the 99%. Legitimate capitalism, on the other hand, uses competition to align consumer and producer interests and serves to improve everyone’s standard of living.
12 Comments
Alex Moscoso
pure capitalism to its finest, good video by this professor for putting an idea in place to constrain government with handouts, politically reasonable and effective.
Matt Wavle
Well said Alex. Crony capitalism is a term that shouldn’t include "capitalism". Perhaps "hijacking the free market" would be better understood than, say the term "graft".
Matt Wavle
Without the natural occurrences of both profits and losses, corporations won’t have the incentives they need to change, and will always be looking to fleece the taxpayers into bailing out their bad choices. Sounds a bit like the 30 yr old bum living off of mom and dad. Time to cut the cord.
Brian Phillips
One of the major problems we have these days is that far too many people don’t understand what capitalism is and automatically compare it to crony capitalism.
Titanium
Good point!
Kevin Burctoolla
spot on.
taschrant
Separate state from economy just like separating church and state. Then we’ll have greater harmony.
jgreene
Awesome! The occupy folks proved to be misinformed as to who to rightfully direct their anger and argument.
Grady Flanagan
Of course they were misinformed. Its what the government wants. The less informed, the less they need freedom, the more they need government to wipe their asses.
Jonathan LeVeille
I think the video is really good. It is very true that OWS was directing their anger and frustration at the wrong target.
Ashwin Katta
Ashwin Katta
Me too.