How does Barack Obama get accused by the Left of selling out to Big Business and on the Right of a massive government takeover of industry? Because he’s kind of doing both.
On the topic of corporatism (or crony capitalism, corporate socialism, subsidy suckling, regulatory robbery, or whatever you call the collusion of Big Business and Big Government), I recommend Daniel Henninger’s column today, which rests on Burt Fulsom’s important distinction of market entrepreneurs vs. political entrepreneurs:
Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world’s dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan “New Jersey must be free,” broke Fulton’s government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will run to ground gaming Barack Obama’s ideas.
If you want more specifics on “political entrepreneurship,” you can check out my columns on drug makers, toymakers, Wall Street, tax preparers, life insurers, or General Electric, just to name a few.
