As Mad Men’s great sage Don Draper once put it, “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”

Charles G. Koch, head of Koch Industries, boogeyman of the Left’s anti-corporate, anti-money-in-politics (except when those politics are progressive) cause, and named target of Bernie Sanders, has done just that. His Washington Post column today, “Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right,” refuses to let self-avowed socialists monopolize the issue of injustice in the corporate world and the evidence that the system is “rigged”:

Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. These are complicated issues, but it’s not enough to say that government alone is to blame. Large portions of the business community have actively pushed for these policies.

Among these policies are special-interest carve-outs in the tax code, regulations that stifle new competition and innovation, and government subsidies. Specifically, Koch cites as an example the ethanol mandate, which Ted Cruz has steadfastly opposed.

Some companies lobby for more regulations, knowing their large, established businesses can withstand them, in order to restrict potential new competitors from entering the market. This corporate cronyism increases prices and reduces consumer choice, and thus, the power of consumers to demand honesty and excellence from companies. It implicates business heads, lobbyists, and government all.

#share#Sanders and his ilk decry the first two without acknowledging the latter’s role in making this “cycle of control” possible. But as Koch does here, it’s important for fiscal conservatives to denounce both the private sector’s role in cronyism and the government for enabling it. Cronyism is incompatible with a free market. If Sanders is the Democratic nominee, it will especially behoove Republicans to make this point. They can agree with Sanders and his supporters on a symptom — that rich and powerful people have rigged the system against the little guy — while disagreeing on the full diagnosis and the cure.

This is Koch’s strategy. After finding common ground, he transitions to an alternative solution — less federal government control, not more:

It is results, not intentions, that matter. History has proven that a bigger, more controlling, more complex and costlier federal government leaves the disadvantaged less likely to improve their lives.

To the end of shrinking federal-government control of the economy, conservatives have proposed ending bank bailouts. Strangely, Sanders and his supporters are also angered by bank bailouts, but blame only the banks, without apprehending how government meddling — not just by the politicians who voted for the bailouts in 2008, but in general — is to blame. In fact, if our economic system ever became thoroughly socialist, we could expect to see more policies enacted on the same principle. Milton Friedman said in an interview that

what distinguishes the private system from a government socialist system is the loss part. If an entrepreneur’s project doesn’t work, he closes it down. If it had been a government project, it would have been expanded, because there is not the discipline of the profit and loss element.

In the same way, complaints about banks being “too big to fail” should be directed in large part at the federal government and the cronyism it facilitates. Doing so would allow fiscal conservatives to find common ground with Sanders supporters even in proposed solutions.