Collusionism Part III: Asymmetries of Information, Choice, and Freedom

The price signals of America's Collusionist economy do not lead us toward optimal social prosperity but into the belly of the corporate elites.

A deep sea anglerfish luring its prey with the enticing glow of bioluminescence. Credit: https://evolutionofplanetearth.com

This is the third part in an on-going series devoted to Collusionism, a political-economic system governed by principles completely different from capitalism and socialism. Part I sketched the broad outlines of the Collusionist system. Part II analyzed how job creation legitimizes and reproduces the Collusionist system. While not necessary, it may be helpful to reference those previous articles while reading this week's piece.

I’m not what you would call a gambling man. My only visit to Vegas as an adult came during a stop on a college cross-country road trip. I started with $100 and told myself that was the most I was willing to lose before the night was through. After a nice run at the roulette table, I had turned my $100 into $140. I decided to call it quits.

In the years since, as Americans’ appetite for risk has grown more and more voracious, I have somehow remained immune from the gambling bug. I don’t play the lottery, not even scratchers. I never signed up for a FanDuel or DraftKings account. I don’t speculate on meme coins, penny stocks, or short term options. The closest I come to the thrill of gambling happens at the CVS Pharmacy desk located in my local Target. Will my wife’s EpiPen cost $2.95 or $295? Hearing the beep of the pharmacist’s scanner and watching a charge under $10 hit the screen is probably the closest feeling I get to watching my teams beat the point spread on a three-leg parlay.

My wife and I both have law degrees. She also has a Master’s in Public Health. But like every other American we have no idea what the hell is going on with the prices of our prescription drugs. Doctor’s visits are also a roll of the dice when it comes to out of pocket costs. I spent well over an hour trying to get Cigna to explain why a 20 minute consultation with a Children’s Hospital gastrointestinal specialist cost $535 despite my daughter having a referral from her pediatrician. I never got a clear answer.

My family’s experiences with American healthcare have been frustrating. But we are blessed our experiences have not been heartbreaking, like the many stories shared by Americans after the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. While I am a staunch supporter of single-payer universal insurance and sympathetic to condemnations of for-profit healthcare, calling the parasitic system we live under “capitalism” never sat right with me. Sure, there is the ruthless pursuit of profit in the name of increasing shareholder value, but the roulette wheel approach to pricing prescriptions and doctor’s visits felt like something entirely different from the idealized conception of capitalism used by economists and policy makers.

I try to judge capitalism on its own terms. The most intellectually honest approach is to define capitalism based on the writings of its greatest advocates, economists like Adam Smith, Ludwig Von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek. While reading the evangelists of capitalism, I have found their most persuasive arguments based on the idea of a free market functioning like a decentralized mechanism that uses prices to gauge society’s needs, desires, and demands for goods and services. Prices serve as both a signal and an incentive for private actors to move resources toward their most socially beneficial destination. The market is conceived of as a form of artificial intelligence, a supercomputer whose main inputs and outputs are the prices that convey valuable information about the needs of society. Supporters of capitalism have buttressed this argument with colorful analogies and compelling anecdotes, the most famous being Adam Smith’s portrayal of the market as an “Invisible Hand” guiding resources toward their most beneficial use. More recently, there was Leonard Read’s 1958 essay “I, Pencil,” a first-person narrative told from the perspective of a pencil whose life’s journey from the wood of a cedar tree to a writing utensil is guided by all the miraculously decentralized free market price incentives along the supply chain. The capitalist narrative that prices based on widely available information and meaningful consumer choice lead to a prosperous society is a compelling one. Too bad this capitalist fairytale completely fails to describe the American economy we have in 2025.

Think about the economic transactions you make on a day to day basis, and you will realize that we are living in a simulacrum of capitalism, a system that retains all of its most ruthless and exploitative incentives for private accumulation and concentration of corporate power, but few of the market mechanisms needed to guide that greed toward socially beneficial ends. Freedom of choice is narrowed to a few oligopolistic conglomerates. Information necessary to make rational economic choices is suppressed or rendered unintelligible by needlessly complex legalese or search results skewed by the highest bidder. Prices are not instructive signals of the people’s wants and needs, but rather nonnegotiable extractive decrees imposed to suck wealth upward to the politically-connected elite. This is not an economy based on the transparent price lists of Adam Smith’s butcher, baker, and brewer. This is an economy based on the unread and unreadable terms and conditions of Apple, Amazon, and Meta. Whether it’s filling our prescription drugs, buying a new cellphone, selecting an internet service provider, or enrolling in waste pickup, our consumer decisions are based on incomplete information, limited meaningful choice, and prices barely affected by the forces of supply and demand. Even simple purchases of groceries, fast food, and fossil fuels are based on prices warped by incentives and tax breaks dolled out by politicians to the Job Creator Aristocracy. This is not a system where the political elites are held accountable by the ballot box and corporate elites are held accountable by the choices of the informed and empowered consumer. This is not democracy. This is not capitalism. This is Collusionism.

As we discussed in the first two parts of this series, Collusionism is an economic system based on a self-reinforcing protection racket run by and for our political and corporate elites. Collusionism sets in when (1) the business elite’s best strategy for profitability is to seek favorable treatment from political leaders rather than servicing the needs of their customers, and (2) the political elites’s best strategy for electability is to seek financial backing of the business elite rather than to meet the needs of their constituents. Collusionism operates stealthily, retaining many outright characteristics of capitalism. There are still prices, profits, and private enterprise. But unlike in the capitalist fairytale where the informed and empowered consumer guides the economy toward maximum social benefit, Collusionists work to limit the choices, information, and freedom of the common citizen to hypercharge the profits of the elites. In the idealized conception of capitalism, the asymmetries of information, choice, and freedom that typify just about every industry in 2025 America are seen as aberrations, market imperfections to be corrected by sound policy. In our Collusionist economy these asymmetries are not only the norm but the very source of power for our elites. A complicity in complexity exists between political and corporate elites making contracts, tax codes, and funding bills so complex that only those wealthy enough to hire an army of lawyers can come out on top. The price of your prescription drugs, the payout on your home insurance, recourse if your trash collection is skipped are all walled off by an impenetrable barrier of legalese and private sector bureaucracy. Prices remain but are no longer the socially beneficial signals and incentives that the evangelists of capitalism told us they were. Instead prices are now lures, distractions and enticements, like the glowing light dangling from the head of the deep sea angler fish. Following these price signals does not lead to the consumer’s enjoyment or material social benefit, but rather to having our wealth swallowed and ingested into the growing bellies of the corporate predators cruising through the murky depths of our Collusionist economy.

The central importance of information asymmetry to Collusionist power is on full display in Elon Musk and his DOGE buddies one-sided pillaging of the administrative state. Elon Musk wants the power to dig through every disbursement made by the Department of Education or USAID but does not want the American people to have the same visibility into the billions of dollars in taxpayer money his own companies have received. Elon wants access to your Social Security Number and other personal information but does not want the identities of his DOGE hacker underlings leaked by the press. Of course Musk and Trump will tell us that they are restoring capitalism, on the presumption that distortions in market prices are caused by socialism smuggled in by the Democratic Trojan Horse that is the administrative state. In their line of thinking, capitalism will only be restored by DOGE taking a wrecking ball to the federal government, doing a full “audit” of all government expenditures, freezing funds, canceling disbursements, and shuttering offices. It is an absurd notion. Stiffing Lutheran refugee programs or shutting down Serbian LGBTQ dance troupes will not give us sensible prescription drug prices or more choices of internet service providers. DOGE is the ultimate diversion tactic, picking on the most vulnerable souls in the world to direct the attention of pork-cutting budget hawks away from fat handouts given to the biggest Collusionist of them all, Elon Musk.

If Elon Musk was a capitalist and not a Collusionist he would pay back with interest every taxpayer dollar used to juice the profits of Tesla and Space X, companies that would have never turned a profit without billions in government assistance. If our billionaire elites were capitalists and not Collusionists, they would have fought to keep Lena Khan as Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. Khan’s efforts to break up monopolies and end hidden fees would have created the meaningful choice and transparent pricing necessary to restore the “sovereignty of the consumer” that Ludwig von Mises claimed was the foundation of the capitalist system. Instead, the corporate elite showed their Collusionist colors by calling for Khan’s ouster - even the liberal ones that new DNC chair Ken Martin calls the “good billionaires” wanted her gone if Kamala Harris won in 2024.

Don’t let the DOGE boys or anyone in the billionaire class fool you. The origins of Collusionism will not be found in the USAID offices, faith-based charities, or liberal NGOs. It is found in the blind trusts, free enterprise think tanks, shell corporations, offshore bank accounts, lobbying firm slush funds, and the C-Suites of America’s most valuable corporations. Our billionaire elites are not hard-working capitalists but lazy Collusionists, seeking to protect their socially destructive profits by weakening the consumer, suppressing information, limiting customer choices and dismantling the regulatory rules needed for free markets to function in the first place.

This piece and the entire series on Collusionism is not meant to be a celebration or even an apologetic for capitalism. Rather, it promotes the realization that the system currently exploiting the vast majority of Americans follows a logic quite different from capitalism, and calling it capitalism will only make the fight against this system less effective. The simple fact is that Americans still favor capitalism over socialism by a wide margin. Calling Elon Musk a capitalist gives him the sheen of a doer, an entrepreneur, a disruptor, an innovator, a job creator. Even words like oligarch or plutocrat can have the flavor of sour grapes to anyone who believes our billionaires amassed their riches through vigorous capitalist competition rather than favors bestowed upon them by bought and sold politicians. Words like “corruption” and “cronyism” suggest the collusion between political and corporate elites is an occasional and marginal occurrence, rather than central and systemic in the reproduction of power and wealth in our society. It is not capitalism with a few warts and imperfections creating the obscene levels of inequality, stress, and social immobility in America today. It is not the free choices of informed and empowered consumers that led three men to amass more riches than over half of the American population combined. It is not the Invisible Hand of the free market but the invisible meetings of the colluding political and corporate elites that have led us to this dystopian moment. Love capitalism or hate it, capitalism is no longer the driving force of wealth accumulation and power concentration in this country. You must name the enemy before defeating the enemy. Call it what you want, but I call it Collusionism.