Crony capitalism is just as bad as communism IMO.
> implying "crony capitalism" isn't just capitalism in its most advanced state
There is no fundamental difference between a state that owns a corporation and a corporation that owns a state. In the absence of a state institution that has absolute authority, people with money will end up buying the state and running it for their own benefit. In an ancap paradise, with functionally no government, one corporation or a partnership of corporations will eventually usurp the function of the state. Absent "regulation" you get massive monopolies, because free competition is only a step on the way to the end-state of capitalism. Success has a snowball effect. If you manage to get bigger than your competitors, you can use your leverage to suppress competition, and it’s in your best interest to do so. It’s also in your best interest to gain control of the regulatory apparatus of a modern democracy and use it to suppress competition that you can’t simply buy out. Big corporations
love regulation. They’re already big, and can afford the army of lawyers needed to cut through a massive cobweb of red tape. It’s a small cost compared to the risk of being outcompeted by a startup with a better product. But startups can’t cut through the red tape as easily, and incur growth-inhibitive costs by doing so.
Simply put, the end-state of capitalism is a massive business entity that suppresses innovation and competition through state mechanisms and a massive bureaucratic apparatus. It doesn’t matter if the restaurants are called “McDonalds” or “Soviet Restaurant #3184”. You will still end up living in a cheap, ugly brutalist building. You will work for an entity that is either the state itself or a close partner of the state. You might say that under socialism the peasants get welfare, and you're not wrong. But Amazon would love, absolutely
love, to pay its workers in housing vouchers and food stamps rather than cold hard cash, if there were no welfare. It would
love to have them all live next to the warehouse. We saw this in the late 19th century with the rise of the company town and company store. Both unfettered capitalism and socialism destroy the freehold and the vocation.
The only difference between socialism and the end-state of the ancap is the motive of its leaders. Socialism is run by utilitarian bureaucrats who seek to maximize human pleasure while the capitalist runs his state like he runs his corporation: to maximize profit for himself. But once the capitalist has a universal monopoly, his best interest shifts to maintaining its monopoly rather than maximizing profit. And a corporation in this state is already a moribund institution. The benefits of capitalism are the benefits of competition. Free competition is a brief, fleeting stage of anarcho-capitalism. The Randian Hero-CEO is soon replaced by the Brezhnevian Nursemaid-CEO who is concerned with minimizing cost and risk in a monopoly, and socialism and capitalism converge in form and function. Today, we have a system where both coexist in a hellish fashion. The socialist state subsidizes the underclass so the capitalist class can get filthy rich, which is then allowed some influence in the state as long as they don’t run afoul of the Left, which turns out to not really hate the capitalists very much despite their Marxist roots, because it turns out that capital is an extraordinary tool for stamping out ideas you don't like.
What you call "crony capitalism" would more accurately just be called "capitalism."
