Please Don’t Feed the Businesses is about the difference between being pro-market and pro-business. It is a liberal view that can't quite admit government is part of the problem yet surprisingly offers a political solution.
It gets to the heart of the difference and the problem quickly:
I take issue with "businesses make money because they have distorted the rules to their advantage or because they have found a way to divert money to their advantage." Businesses don't make the rules, the government does. The government is the one that creates the subsidies that businesses then take advantage of.In a competitive system, businesses make money because they are better. In a crony capitalist system, businesses make money because they have distorted the rules to their advantage or because they have found a way to divert money to their advantage.
This is the fundamental distinction, all too often unappreciated by the press and in political debate: the difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. If you are pro-business, you like subsidies for businesses; you want to make sure that they make the largest profits possible. If, on the other hand, you are pro-markets, you want to behave like the ranger in the Grand Canyon: by enacting restrictions, ensuring that markets remain competitive and rules are designed properly, and preventing businesses from becoming too dependent on a crony system to survive.
Once that is correct, it follows logically that the solution to corrupt crony capitalism is this:
We need rules. We need to protect private property and we need to protect contracts. What we do not need are rules that try to manage businesses for political purposes....One is that the best way to make a system robust to corruption is to decentralize and distribute the power. Similarly, the best way to make sure that rules are designed to make markets more competitive and not to favor incumbents is to try to bring to the table the largest number of people. If you have to legislate to make rules about general principles, it will be much easier to find some points in common that benefit everyone. Once we go into the details and bring the interested parties to the table, those parties will have a vested interest in distorting the rules to their advantage.
In practice, this decentralization, this distribution of power, is nothing less than a form of democracy. If you want a capitalist system to work well, you need to have a democratic system that works well at the same time. You need to bring to the democratic process as many people as possible because they are more likely to design rules in the interest of the community at large rather than the interests of a few small producers.
(The use of tPF is to deal with trolls.)