It usually advances by getting people to believe that a bogeyman known as “capitalism” is to blame for their troubles. The truth is that the apparent failures of capitalism are due to previous meddling in the natural order of liberty by the statists. Because few people are able to see that, they’re apt to draw the conclusion that the statists want: We need a controlled, collectivist society.
For a superb discussion of that, I recommend Max Borders’ AIER essay, “Wait for It… “It’s Capitalism’s Fault”
As he explains:
The politically powerful actively destroy the ideal features of an entrepreneurial market system, often to compromise with anti-capitalists. They then blame capitalism for every failure of intervention. This process began long ago. Now, the best we can say is interventionism creates ideal conditions under which corporations and authorities may collude. And boy they do. The extent to which entrepreneurs ally with government officials is the extent to which the system becomes less capitalist, less liberal, and more corrupted by degree.
Capitalism got the blame back in the 1930s, and that spawned the vast administrative state that bedevils us today and the huge economic crisis that’s brewing will no doubt be blamed on capitalism (what’s left of us). Borders argues that we must not let the statists get away with it.
Borders concludes, “Unless the people regulate the government and redistribute its power back to individuals, we will lurch from crisis to crisis that interventions cause. And our fascist/socialist enemies will just double down.”
Read the whole thing.