I think it's humorous that crony capitalism and corporatism exists in the form that it does today because people feel the need to regulate and control businesses and free enterprise for 'the common good'. That's always the cry isn't it? Big evil corporations doing big evil bad things, so we need to give government more power to benevolently swoop in and save us from the uncaring, greedy capitalists. Sadly, people don't realize that the only REAL threat to these big guys is market competition, yet our predilection towards increasing labor, regulations, and general restrictions only serves to disproportionally hurt their smaller competitors.
In theory, market competition would be great. The problem is, it
doesn't work all the time.
First of all, there are many industries where it can't exist in the first place -- telecom and other utilities, for instance. To achieve the sort of "market competition" you think is the savior of everything, we'd have to abolish government grants of right-of-way and let each "competitive" telecom company negotiate individually with the owners of each individual property they wanted to string their lines across. The network would never get built. Or maybe the first-mover telecom would successfully build out, but nobody else could afford to because they'd split the subscriber base and have a too-high cost per subscriber (leaving the same situation we have now). Or even if multiple competitors
did manage to build out, we'd be left with a hugely-duplicated rat's nest of wiring like you'd see in a third-world country.
Second, even when those sorts of barriers to entry don't exist, things like first-mover advantage, network effects, and lack of information cause actual distortions in the "free market." For example, I
don't have a real choice between online social networks; I can either capitulate and use Facebook or socially isolate myself. For another example, it's easy to say that if people cared about companies being environmentally-friendly, they'd choose to be customers of environmentally-friendly companies -- but without that "evil regulation" requiring companies to disclose their environmental record, there's no way for the customers to tell the difference and make an informed choice! And of course, let's not forget externalities -- if customer A chooses product B which harms third-party C, there's no market competition solution to fix C's problem.
The bottom line is, the "free market" is not a panacea, and the people who claim it is are either intentionally lying or are conflating it with
perfect competition. But perfect competition does not exist, and (admittedly, counter-intuitively)
regulation is required to make competition closer to perfect.
Also, I don't think your base argument is well-reasoned. Corporations derive their power from money, specifically voluntary transactions from consumers. People willingly GIVE them money. I guess it's easier for you to vilify business instead of telling people to stop buying Starbucks.
I don't give a shit about Starbucks; it's not the problem. You know why it's not the problem? Two reasons: First, you intentionally picked one of the least-problematic industries in terms of barriers to entry and other market-distorting problems. Second, Starbucks is, in fact,
regulated! It is not, for example, allowed to claim its coffee is "free-trade" or "organic" if it isn't. It is required to meet standards for food safety and worker safety. It is prohibited from lying about it's products (e.g. by advertising its coffee as a patent medicine). Etc.
Also, I think some of what your describing is a result of our tax policy. The government cares more about the taxpayers than it does the voters, like it should. People that contribute to the government, to the public good, will naturally have more influence on the use of those tax dollars than the people that contribute nothing. If you want a say in government, you pay your equal share of taxes. If you push the lion's share of the public burden on the shoulder's of the few, you're setting yourself up for failure, for cronyism, for corruption. It's partially the reason that prior to the 16th Amendment the government was only able to levy taxes proportionally across the population. For most of our history the federal government couldn't tax one citizen more than another. People were less likely to use votes to steal things from fellow citizens like healthcare, food, water, etc. "Trading votes for food" used to be a common phrase during the 1930's.
Equal taxation is great in theory -- it would work fine if society were relatively egalitarian -- but in
reality how do you propose to do that while still being confiscatory enough to the upper class to prevent inequality from spiraling out of control and leading to peasant revolts? I mean, is a communist revolution what you want? 'Cause insufficiently-progressive taxation is how you get it!
