Crony capitalism is just as "“No country has achieved real communism” scape goat reply communists say when someone tells them about communist countries atrocities in the past.

Capitalism by itself, doesn’t necessarily involve direct government coordination. You have shareholders who invest capital in a business, and collect dividends from that investment, and the government has almost nothing to do with it, aside from having passive (systemic) protections in place that legitimize the exploitation of the working class.

Crony Capitalism is when Capitalists are directly coordinating with government officials in order to maximize their exploitation of the working class. It’s less passively “systemic” and more actively aggressive.

This video from Barry’s Economics is a fantastic explanation of exactly what you’re asking.

The whole channel is probably of interest to you.

But in short, yes. What we currently have in the US is a mutated bastardization of capitalism. The wealthy have spent the last ~50 years bending capitalism tward something like a kind of neo-feudalism.

To your second question:
Anyone who thinks one system is going to be the best at everything is just silly. Some markets are best served by capitalism. Others would be socialist. A few critial markets would likely be best server by more communist style, direct government monopoly. Mixing, matching, and even switching systems as markets grow and evolve will be vital in the future.

“Crony capitalism” is a term invented by defenders of capitalism so that they can put all the bad parts of capitalism in a separate bucket and say “that’s not real capitalism.” It’s a “no true Scotsman” fallacy.

The main problem I see is that earth is not infinite. You have finite resources that are “owned by everyone” by their nature, and capitalism’s competitivness incentivizes their destruction.

World’s countries are allowing companies to destroy the climate, forests, and oceans. They (mostly) know it’s bad, but if they stopped, they would fall behind. And it doesn’t really matter whether the countries are capitalist inside or not - they are competing against each other.

I don’t see why it would be different if instead of countries it would be companies competing. If you have two giant companies fishing in ocean, how would you convince one of them to fish less so it doesn’t destroy the whole fish population? Any fish it doesn’t catch is a gift for the competing company. And sure, two companies can make an agreement, but what if there are hundreds of them? You would think it’s logical for all of them to agree on limits so they don’t kill all the fish - that would be the end every single fishing company. But how is that different from what’s happening with climate change right now?

I’ve seen a video where someone asked a Czech anarcho-capitalist how would the law in ancap work. He responded that the international law is an ancap law. You don’t have a Global State enforcing law on the world’s countries. They do whatever they want on their own property (land), and they form coalitions by free agreement to maintain peace and order and to deal with stuff like climate change.

Well, when I look at the world right now, I feel like that’s the ultimate argument against ancap. We don’t have anything resembling forever global peace, like some people belived after the cold war. The planet is getting warmer and warmer, despite all the global organizations and agreements. Competion is a competition. I don’t really see a way out other than a global state or global anarchy - the leftist kind of one.

And I don’t want to start on why I think a global state is a terrible idea - that’s not what you asked - but I’m obviously for the latter.

Would TRUE capitalism have any problems?

Well only a TRUE Scottsman could tell you how TRUE capitalism works.

But OK so in short the gist of theory in capitalism.

Free market ideas - IE capitalism with no government oversite. If a company makes shitty products, someone else will make a less shitty product and all consumers will switch, or if a company starts dumping toxic waste into the drinking water, people would figure it out and stop buying that product… Parts of it are kind of a pipe dream because, some products are inherantly expensive to get started in. Lets face it, Facebook, Windows etc… aren’t dominant because their products are the best, pretty sure you could poll their userbase and find abysmal satisfaction among them. Yet even a giant as big as google, can’t accomplish the resources needed to compete in those markets… let alone a startup out of nowhere.

Now regulations obviously that’s where crony vs regulated comes up in discussion.

Obviously to me the big part is, safety matters. First off the bat, information, consumers can’t even make decisions if they don’t know. If you are putting poison in food, or calling something healthy when it’s loaded with crap, consumers have to know that.

Environmental is a bigger problem. Obviously requiring you to shield and not leak toxins into the drinking water… is a big problem, and it creates a huge problem, as the companys selling gas, or manufacturing chemicals etc… that spend less on safety are at a huge advantage in pricing to the consumer, who can’t tell why the more ethical companies are so expensive, only that they are more expensive. But the more safety that’s required, the higher the bar to entry is…

There are two effects you’re not considering.

First, if you make the best product, everyone else will leave the business, so you become a monopoly. But almost everything has what are called barriers to entry. I can’t open a microchip factory; the investment is absurd. That’s why large companies can easily buy out startups, and that’s why we constantly see market concentration. It didn’t happen before because until the 1970s, antitrust laws were serious; now they’re a joke.

There’s another important issue: in a 100% free capitalist system, it’s assumed that initial bargaining power isn’t equal, so those with more can pressure those with less, making wealth concentration more and more concentrated. Adequate government regulation can help level the playing field between employer and employee, but that’s another thing that hasn’t been improving in recent decades.

What you’re describing isn’t capitalism per se, but a free market. They tend to be correlated, but you can have either one without the other. Capitalism strictly speaking is about private ownership of production—when private investors control industry and reap the remaining profits after wages and taxes.

Crony capitalism is when investors influence the state to reduce wages and taxes, and to manipulate the market at the expense of rival investors. It tends to be the outcome in any state where spending money to influence policy generates a positive return.

as someone has to lead

At this particular moment, the people of Minnesota are self-organizing the resistance against the invasion of their state, with no unified leadership structure in place. So I wouldn’t say it’s always mandatory.

Long live l’etoile du nord.

The actual problem, from an anarchist-anarcho capitalist sense, is that capitalism is morally incompatible with the state or a government conceptually, because given the nature of capitalism—and moreover people in general—free enterprise will also take hold of this all powerful monopoly that is the state, and then pervert it to its own ends.

Hence, crony capitalism.

Arguably, whether capitalism or socialism, when combined with a State, both break down rapidly.