I regularly like to tell anyone who will listen that Bernie Sanders is a good diagnostician but that his proposed treatments will kill the patient — the patient in this case being the United States economy. Bernie is absolutely correct that America has a problem with the too-tight nexus between the government and corporations.

Where Bernie goes wrong is with his insistence that the cure for this ailment \is to give the government an even bigger role in managing or taking over American business. That’s exactly bass ackwards. Crony capitalism damages the economy and hurts consumers because it creates an incredible concentration of wealth, forcibly removed from taxpayers) that is not subject to the rigors of the free market. This money pool, which is bought and sold in political backrooms, is a breeding ground for inefficiency and corruption:

The answer to America’s crony capitalism problem (and it’s a very real problem, as Solyndra and other green energy fails show), isn’t to hand more of the economy over to the U.S. government. The government is inherently inept and taxpayer money is a treasure trove for every kind of crook and grifter.

Instead, the answer is to get the government and its money out of business, so that the free market allows good ideas to succeed and bad ideas to fail. As Daniel Webster famously said, “There’s always room at the top.”

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