Crony Capitalism

With all due respect, I ask that bloggers give ample consideration before repeating the term "Crony Capitalism".

Yes, it is a beautiful sounding phrase with consonance.  But it is verbally spent.  It is a coin of little value.

The problem with terms like that is they degrade into jingos.  People hear the term and assume when they are thinking when they are merely brushing the door knob of meaningful thought.

Perhaps the evolutionary path to "crony capitalism" shared some ancestors with capitalism.  But that is about as accurate as calling a Tasmanian Devil a Possum with Poor Emotion Regulation.

---Insert http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOTlNOZB4Zo here ---

I propose that we call it something like Neo-Feudalism. 

The abuses of Feudalism led to the Magna Carta, which in many ways was a rough draft of the United States Constitution.

Just to list one egregious abuse of Feudalism, the Lord of the Manor would "bed" the new bride before the groom...if he were sober enough.  His rational was that both bride and groom were his property. It was his prerogative, in fact his duty, to remind them of that so they would not get uppity.

Poisoning of solutions

The other thing that bothers me is that the term "Crony Capitalism" will poison many paths toward workable solutions.  The Orwellian nature of the term will make solutions that involve ample doses of pure "Capitalism" non-starters.  Those kinds of solutions will not even get on the table where solutions are discussed by the door-knob brushers.

The problems are dire enough, the consequences severe and the day of reckoning is near enough, that we cannot afford to let sloppy semantics poison our thinking.