The latest issue of First Things, which isn’t even highlighted on their website yet, features an article by Acton Institute Director of Research and “Tea Party Catholic” extraordinaire Samuel Gregg entitled “Catholic Blindness.” Without getting into the details of the piece here (that’s for another time), let me note that for those who have followed the general trajectory of Acton’s apologetics for free markets and small government, the article doesn’t break any new ground. In fact, it’s more-or-less an advertisement for Actonism and perhaps part of a campaign to ramp-up interest in Acton University for 2015. Anyway, lurking behind Gregg’s pro-market apologia and, indeed, most of the ideological rhetoric that emanates from the Acton Institute is the specter of crony capitalism, an intentionally slippery concept that is mean to instill fear in the hearts of anyone who believes there is a legitimate—indeed necessary—role for government in the operation of the economy. I call the concept “slippery” because it can be, and often is, quietly expanded and retracted over the course of a single exposition in order to meet an array of critical challenges. Moreover, as I will discuss more below, it is far from clear that crony capitalism describes a new phenomenon—one which is distinct from capitalism per se or, at least, any form of capitalism which has actually existed in the real world. There’s apologetic utility in that. For if every critique of capitalism is not a critique of “real capitalism” but only “crony capitalism,” then the espousers of “real capitalism” are free to continue promoting their ideology without fear of falsification. The irony, of course, is that Actonites and other free-market apologists—including Gregg in his First Things article—perpetually point to real world examples of what they claim is “real capitalism” (not “crony capitalism”!) at work to empirically defend themselves. And this is where the expansion and contraction of the crony capitalism descriptor really comes into play.
