Dr. Newman's new book in the Cronyism series is Rothbardian history at its finest and crafts a powerful revisionist narrative that is both scholarly and engaging. Readers will never look at the Progressive Era in the same way. Cronyism: Rise of the Corporatist State, 1849–1929 describes the creation of the system of government-enforced cartels in the United States economy. From the Federal Reserve to the Food and Drug Administration, Cronyism reveals how government regulatory agencies and commissions were designed by special interests to benefit themselves.
During the Civil War, railroad, manufacturing, and banking interests lobbied the government for favorable subsidies and restrictions on competitors. In the following decades, emerging big businesses attempted to use their special privileges to cartelize markets. But unrelenting competition and the emergence of rival interest groups thwarted their efforts. The result was the so-called Progressive Era, when Wall Street lobbied the government to create regulatory agencies and commissions that would restrict competition and block other interest groups' hostile legislative proposals. In the thoroughly big business-dominated corporatist state that emerged, the main loser was the consumer, forced to pay higher prices, and endure lower quality and reduced product variety.
Patrick Newman is an assistant teaching professor of economics at the University of Tampa and the Murray N. Rothbard Research Fellow at the Mises Institute. He is the author of
Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–
1849 and the editor of Rothbard's
The Progressive Era and
Conceived in Liberty, Volume V: The New Republic, 1784–
1791.