Power & Market

Political Capitalism: How Economic and Political Power is Made and Maintained. By Randall G. Holcombe. Cambridge University Press, 2018. X + 294 pages.

Randall Holcombe is best known as an economist for his work in public choice, but in this impressive new book, he adds a historical dimension to public choice by combining it with “elite theory.” In doing this, he arrives at a controversial thesis: a new economic system, “political capitalism,” has come to replace market capitalism. In arguing for his thesis, Holcombe shows a remarkable knowledge of the literature in economics, political science, and sociology.

By “political capitalism”, Holcombe means the same as what is often called “crony capitalism,” and as he notes, the concept is a well-established one. There is widespread agreement by people with different political views that the American economy is dominated by an alliance of elite business and political interests. David Stockman and Joseph Stiglitz are usually at odds, but not here. Stiglitz argues, “’We have a political system that gives inordinate power to those at the top, and they have used that power not only to limit the extent of redistribution but also to shape the rules of the game in their favor.’ Echoing those views, Stockman says. . .’the state bears an inherent flaw that dwarfs the imperfections purported to afflict the free market, namely that policies undertaken in the name of the public good inexorably become captured by special interests and crony capitalists who appropriate resources from society’s commons for their own private ends.’” (p.5) (Besides the many works that Holcombe cites, the outstanding book of Hunter Lewis, Crony Capitalism in America, deserves mention in this connection.)

Holcombe contends that political capitalism is a new system, distinct from market capitalism and socialism. The term, he tells us, comes from Max Weber, who used it to “describe the political and economic systems of ancient Rome.” (p.8). Holcombe applies the concept to contemporary America.  “The analysis that follows concludes that political capitalism, in which the political and economic elite control the system for their own benefit, is not market capitalism and should be analyzed as a separate economic system.” (p. ix) It is this thesis that I should like to examine.

He argues for it by extending the public choice analysis of government by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. These economists challenged, though they did not altogether reject, the standard neoclassical contention that the free market cannot adequately supply public goods and so needed to be supplemented by state intervention. In the standard view, economic actors motivated by self-interest will tend to “free ride,” relying on others to produce public goods. The consequence is an underproduction of them.

Buchanan and Tullock posed a devastating question that weakened the force of the standard view’s policy conclusions, though doing so without challenging the assumptions of the neoclassical model. Why assume that government policymakers are less self-interested than market actors? “Government is not omniscient. Policymakers do not have all the information necessary to allocate resources to match the theoretically optimum welfare maximum. Government is not benevolent. People in government look out for their own interests just as people do in the private sector. Their incentives need to be taken into account to understand how public policy works in the real world.” (p.14)

Buchanan and Tullock rejected theories of group exploitation, but Holcombe does not agree: “Buchanan and Tullock ‘also reject any theory or conception of the collectivity which embodies the exploitation of a ruled by a ruling class. This includes the Marxist vision, which incorporates the polity as one means through which the economically dominant group imposes its will on the downtrodden.’ The public choice approach to analyzing political decision making, as Buchanan and Tullock see it, leaves no room for the group behavior and elite theories that are the subject of this chapter[and book].” (pp.64-65)

How does Holcombe accept group exploitation theories without rejecting Buchanan and Tullock’s stress on the motivations of individual actors? The key to the mystery lies in the Coase theorem. “When transaction costs are low, people can bargain to allocate resources in a way that maximizes the value to the members of the low-transaction cost group---the people who are able to bargain. When transaction costs are high, people will not be able to bargain to allocate resources to maximize the value to them. . .The people in the low-transaction group bargain with each other to make public policy. The people in the high-transaction cost group . .. .find themselves subject to the policies designed by those in the low-transaction cost group. Those in the low-transaction cost group are the elite; those in the high-transaction cost-group are the masses.” (p.76)

This difference in transaction costs permits the continuity over time that elite theory requires. So long as the difference persists, long-lasting dominance by an elite group or class is possible. For example, incumbents in Congress, regardless of party, are often allied against challengers. Owing to the difficulty of ousting them, they can retain power for a substantial period of time. “Those who have political power conspire to keep it, and have more in common with each other than with others in their same party who do not have that power. . The more significant dimension of political competition is between those who with power versus their challengers for that power, not the competition of one party against another. This is true in political capitalism, but also true of government in general.”(p.191)

Holcombe devotes a great deal of attention to the mechanisms of rent-seeking and regulatory capture, by which elites in government join forces to exploit the masses. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether government or business interests dominate the coalition. In one maneuver, the legislature will threaten to pass laws that would adversely affect certain interests, inducing the interested parties to offer “donations” to induce the legislature to turn its attention elsewhere. “Those in government have an incentive to extract payment in exchange for legislative action, or inaction, and those who are paying have an incentive to continue paying to avoid having costs imposed on them.” (p.129)

Holcombe’s argument within its own terms is powerful, but it suffers from a limitation that the more wide-ranging approach of Murray Rothbard avoids. The public choice school says, in effect, “Politicians are not impartial public servants, aiming for the good of all. They too are self-interested actors.” Everyone’s dominant motivation is to gain wealth, and ideological considerations play a minor role. Why, for example, do incumbents want to remain in power? The primary reason as Holcombe views the matter is to extract economic rents.

Rothbard allows far more room to those dominated by ideas, though he also emphasizes people’s economic self-interest. People made the American Revolution, for example, in part because they genuinely believed in the ideals stated in the Declaration of Independence. Lenin genuinely believed in communism: he did not start the October Revolution to make himself a millionaire. It is of course true that both of these revolutions also benefited some at the expense of others.

To this contention, there is a well-known public choice response, best expressed in Gordon Tullock’s The Social Dilemma. Revolutionary action is a public good, and ideological revolutionaries will prefer to free ride on the actions of other revolutionaries, thus avoiding costs to themselves. Even if this analysis is correct, it proves less than Tullock and other exponents of public choice think it does. Tullock has applied the standard neoclassical analysis of public goods to revolutions, but, as previously mentioned, the standard model concludes that a public good will not be supplied efficiently. It does not hold that the good will not be supplied at all. If Tullock is right, perhaps we have less than the efficient quantity of ideological revolutions. But the historical record shows that we have some of them.

Given the malign effects of political capitalism, Holcombe naturally wonders what can be done to restrain it. He says that his book is concerned primarily with an analysis of the system rather than remedial action, but he does suggest that limiting the power of the state through constitutional checks and balances is desirable. Such limits hold some promise to impede a rapacious government. The Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries favored government action to limit corporate predation, but this did not work: “The Progressive ideology legitimizes the use of force for the economic benefit of some at the expense of others.” (p.230) Holcombe’s suggestions are all to the good, and he has written in greater detail with insight and erudition about this topic in From Liberty to Democracy.

There is another limit to political capitalism, and explaining it requires us to challenge Holcombe’s central thesis that political capitalism is a new economic system. From a Misesian point of view, there are no intermediate economic systems between capitalism and socialism. As Mises remarks: “With regard to the same factors of production there can only exist private control or public control. “ (Human Action, Scholar’s Edition, p.712) Measures of the sort analyzed in Holcombe’s book hamper the free market, but they do not provide an alternative way to allocate resources efficiently. If political capitalism were a “third system,” it would be faced with the calculation problem. Because economic calculation requires a free market, political capitalism is inherently parasitic on the free market and this is a barrier to the damage it can do. Given its bad results, that is small consolation.

Subjective value is not objective. Sounds obvious, but the distinction is lost on most — scholars and practitioners alike.

People seem to think subjective value is simply a person's 'willingness to pay' a price. Well, it's not. Subjective value cannot be expressed in dollars and cents, because that would simply mean subjective value is an expression in terms of objective market purchasing power.

If value is subjective, however, that purchasing power too is subjectively valued, in terms of what subjective value it can provide (through the actual goods and services the money can purchase). And, in any market-like setting, willingness to give up purchasing power for a good only indicates that the person subjectively values that purchasing power (however it is appreciated by him/her) less than the value expected from the good that can be purchased.

Willingness to pay, expressed in the dollars and cents that in turn can command goods and services, only means the buyer expects to be better off from going through with the exchange. In terms of value theory, there may be no connection between the value of that which is forgone and that which is gained in return, other than them being valued differently (the former higher than the latter). 

Scholars should know better than to confuse these things, but they're obviously quite confused. 

Instead of thinking about the meaning of what they say, they adopt a practical shorthand used to get a dollar amount on a customer's valuation. This makes some sense from a practitioner's perspective, where a customer's willingness to pay for one's good is a rough estimate of what money price could potentially be charged for the good. 

It's not accurate, however, which is why entrepreneurship models suggest that entrepreneurs should make sure to charge a price lower than customer's stated willingness to pay (if it can at all be trusted). 

Also, the actual willingness to pay depends on offering the actual good along with the argument for why it would be valuable for the customer to have/buy it.

In a different time and place, and with different messaging, this 'willingness' changes both with how the good is subjectively appraised and with the other opportunities available to the customer. I might value a hamburger, but I value a hot dog more. 

Consequently, if there are hot dogs my willingness to pay for hamburgers is practically zero; if there are no hot dogs in sight, my willingness to pay for hamburgers may be significant. See how this works?

One's willingness to pay is not about the [subjective] value of the good itself (that is, the satisfaction experienced, or in any case expected), but is contingent on alternatives available. Practitioners who are careful can gain insights from willingness-to-pay estimations. But it is still a very blunt tool, since what actually matters is the subjective valuation of a good and the subjective valuation of alternative goods (the comparison/tradeoff). 

That scholars equate subjective valuation with objective money prices should be considered severe professional misconduct. For those who are in the business of thinking carefully about things, there is no place for conflating things. 

Or, as in this case, mistaking (interpreting, really) subjective value for being objective. This is inexcusable and should disqualify you from the academy.

Originally published on Twitter @PerBylund

Words are funny. Strung together, they can have multiple meanings depending on the perceived context and reader’s viewpoint. I can make a statement with the intent to convey argument A, but the reader interprets my statement as not-A.

An example: Trotsky, in “What Next? Vital Question for the German Proletariat” (published as “How Mussolini Triumphed,” in Fascism: What it is and how to fight it, 1944), disparaged the Italian socialist, Turati, for saying, regarding the political battle with Mussolini’s fascist movement, “One must have manhood to be a coward.”

Given the context, it appears Turati spoke with a sense of irony, defending his political strategy. Trotsky subjected those same words to close reading in order to bolster his argument that the Italian socialist was retreating before the fascists. Turati claimed he had manhood, while Trotsky insinuated Turati was a coward.

Forgetting the internecine war among socialists, let’s examine Turati’s prescient claim in another context: the draft.

During my high school years , “Jimmy Carter signed Proclamation (Registration Under the Military Selective Service Act) in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the previous year of 1979, retroactively re-establishing the Selective Service registration requirement for all 18- to 26-year-old male citizens born on or after January t, 1960.” This made me eligible for the draft upon turning 18.

But who was I going to fight – who was I supposed to slaughter, burn, maim, etc.? In 1981, as my eighteenth birthday approached, it looked like a hot war in Nicaragua or elsewhere was possible – actually, likely. That meant I could have ended up in uniform shooting peasant farmers whose political worldview disagreed with the then-current policies of the US government – policies that changed with elections. Today’s enemy could be tomorrow’s ally.

Regardless of the side, I could have been required to do the bidding of those in power, to bloody my hands and taint my soul. As a quasi-radical, or what went for a quasi-radical in middle class, suburban Pittsburgh in the early 1980’s, I would have none of it.

In those days, I was a Deadhead – a fan of the rock group, the Grateful Dead. Each Sunday evening, a true public radio station (i.e. non-government funded) had a show that replayed recordings of the band’s concerts. Either before that show or after it (l no longer remember) was another show where antiwar activists discussed the evils of US interventions overseas – this is back when there was a strong antiwar left. That program greatly influenced me. And when there was talk about conscientious objection to war, I listened.

Initially, upon turning 18, I refused to register. However, based on information from the radio show, as well as consultations with my church minister and the antiwar mother of a friend, I learned my best chance to not being forced to point a gun – ironically, at the point of a government bayonet – was to register, but register as a conscientious objector.

However, I did not write this article as a guide to registering as a conscientious objector today – there are many resources on the internet. Instead, I wrote it to discuss the Turati-Trotsky rhetorical divide and answer the question of whether it takes manhood to be a coward. My article is also meant to encourage today’s youth to stand for peace and not war.

To answer the coward question in the context of this article, I revised Turati’s statement to read, “One must have manhood to object to war.” Sadly, that is a true statement, with an unwillingness to fight perceived by many as a sign of cowardice. This is especially so given the lack of any antiwar movement outside of libertarianism.

If the government institutes the draft and your number comes up, are you prepared? If you believe war is wrong, you need to begin documenting those beliefs well in advance of a draft. That documentation will be the primary evidence on your side as you stand before the draft board. 

Nevertheless, if your number comes up, you will be called to “serve.” And you may not get that deferral. You may end up being forced to fight. lf you choose not to, you will likely end up in prison, which is not a coward’s path. Additionally, where you would have probably been placed in a non-frontline position (most soldiers are not even near the frontlines, never coming face to face with a person in a different uniform), your objection may put you on the line as an unarmed medic. Again, not a coward’s path.

Nevertheless, folks will call you a coward. But it also takes manhood to hold your ground in face of social pressure.

Luckily, there was no draft in the 1980’s and I never had to find out whether I would have held true to my ideals – whether I truly had manhood. But you, youth of today, may not be so lucky. Plan ahead. Political positions change. War may be nearer than thought. These words, spoken by former Prime Minister Henry Palmerstone in the British Parliament in 1848, are as true in the US today, “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

And those interests may indeed lead to war.

Ask yourself whether you are willing to kill in an unjust war, whether decrees from the US government can provide sufficient moral justification for you to slaughter folks in Afghanistan or Nicaragua (in my day), or anywhere, and whether being called a coward is more frightening than selling your soul, so to speak.

For me the answer is no, but I am long past the draft age. What is your answer?

Think, consider, and act today!

Democratic socialists in America are trying to introduce their ideology as something new, when in fact, they are only retreading old-fashioned ideas that history has already disproven. They are ideas that have led to the economic devastation of every country in which they have been implemented.

Having seen the effects of this ideology on our home communities in Venezuela, we feel compelled to warn Americans that if they allow socialism to spread in the United States — as it has done in Venezuela — they will condemn their country to a future of misery.

We know that young people, sometimes, grow enamored with utopian ideals. The movements that cater to them are often labeled as many different movements, whether “social democrats,” “ social Christians ,” or “progressives.” These movements work hard to address their speeches and campaigns to the youth.

There’s nothing new about this. Even Friedrich Hayek admitted he believed once in this system as a young man, noting “Socialism promised to fulfill our hopes for a more rational, more just world… we have been looking for improvement in the wrong direction.”

Now young Americans are hearing and believing in promises similar to what Venezuelans did in the 50’s, and well into the period of Chavismo, that began in 1998 . The promises include “free healthcare,” “free education,” “a right to a job,” “free housing,” “gun control,” and, of course, that old-fashioned socialist motto “a state that works for you” (which really means, “ supports you”)

It is evident that a new generation of politicians want to be elected on this basis, and they have found a way to win by mobilizing people who agree with their ideas. So, they will continue promoting a climate of confrontation and division because they have no interest in convincing others who do not already think like them.

As with Hugo Chávez in his moment , this new generation of American politicians has the support of almost all mainstream media, some economic elite, and the academic world. They have been invited to appear on many of the most important TV shows, which gives them an excellent platform and increase their media presence, and generally they are treated with a soft and delicate indulgence. While other politicians have to fight for open their own spaces in the media and handle rude and non-friendly interviewers, these socialism-friendly politicians have had everything, as we say in Venezuela “served on a silver platter.” It is a true that second-hand dealers of ideas still do their work, as Hayek stated.

Finally, Americans have to be sure of something. The devastation that comes with a socialist political victory will not occur immediately. In our country, 40 years of progressive eradication of our economic freedom — before the Chavismo — were needed to reverse the great economic success of the “Economic Miracle” we enjoyed from 1950 to 1958. The problem is that the groundwork of this movement in the United States is sowing the seeds of a cultural and educational change — as was done from 1958 to 1998 in Venezuela. It won’t happen immediately, but eventually, the idea of getting something for nothing could come to dominate and in that moment — as is currently in Venezuela — it will be almost impossible to recover the freedom through a democratic system. At that point, it would become necessary replicate the Singapore experience.