Increases in government power expand, rather than shrink, producer-groups’ access to unwarranted privileges – privileges that are unavailable in competitive markets. As the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey notes on page 35 of her 2006 book The Bourgeois Virtues: “When American steel producers get tariffs or when sugar beet growers get import quotas it is not because of their market power but because of their political power, their access to an all-powerful state.”
That’s from Professor Donald J. Boudreaux. Said differently, worshippers of the state implicitly endorse crony capitalism and social inequality.
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