The Ex-Im Bank epitomizes just the kind of unashamed corporate welfare that animates populist hostilities on both the American political right and left, the collusive cronyism that — whatever their rhetoric — establishment elites of both sides embrace with enthusiasm. The Democrat and Republican halves of the Washington political machine each have their own cynical uses for populist moods, but when the chips are down and the votes are cast American capitalism just is the active collaboration of powerful interests in big business and government. We have never had a free market in the United States, nothing even remotely close.

Agencies like the Ex-Im Bank redistribute wealth from ordinary taxpayers to the political chosen, mammoth corporations such as Boeing that couldn’t survive for a single day without constant, committed intervention from the American state. In 2010, nearly half of all Ex-Im Bank loans and loan guarantees went to that most favorite of aerospace giants, a year in which the company saw over $64 billion in revenue. So much for the oft-repeated propaganda about supporting small businesses. The Ex-Im Bank exists to ensure that the biggest companies, well-connected with lawmakers and regulators, never actually have to so much as think about competing in a hypothetical “free market system.”

Beyond Boeing, top clients of the cronyist Bank include General Electric, Caterpillar, and KBR, the notoriously corrupt former Halliburton subsidiary that has devoured hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts. While it’s difficult to know exactly how much risk taxpayers are exposed to until, for example, a default actually occurs, the Congressional Budget Office recently poked holes in some of the Bank’s numbers. In a report this month (May 2014), the CBO said that under “fair-value” accounting — rather than the accounting method prescribed by the Federal Credit Reform Act — the Bank will cost taxpayers $2 billion over the next decade.

That’s just what we can see. We have no idea what free people making voluntary exchanges might do with those resources were they not tied up in the coercive, statist game of American capitalism. Advocates of individual rights and open competition, market anarchists distinguish between capitalism as it now exists, and has in fact always existed, and legitimate free markets.

Indeed, we use the term “freed markets” to signify that people have never yet been free from the tethers of state control within the economy. Real freed markets, without handouts to big business and incalculable other interventions, would distribute private property more widely and evenly, eroding the power and market share of the United States’ corporate titans.

The politically powerful devotedly serve the economically powerful — and the reverse is no less true. The Ex-Im Bank is just one of countless examples of big business courting the federal government, seeking and cultivating favorable public policy as a means of avoiding the discomfort of competition. In contrast, the kind of free competition that market anarchists favor is not at all antithetical to concerns about social and economic justice.

We see the goals of freedom and equality as mutually reinforcing. The imposition of the state against free people and their voluntary organizations is not protective but predatory, pitting people against each other in a fight to control the state. Agencies like the Ex-Im Bank are the illegitimate result of that ongoing fight. Perhaps it’s time to try this free market we keep hearing so much about.

Monopoly and inordinate accumulation naturally attend one another, the inefficiencies and crises that stem from such a system requiring excessive reliance on debt. Under such a system, then, the commercial bank, trussed, needless to say, to the national banking network, becomes far more important, central to the character and to the functioning of the overall economy. Since the relationships at issue benefit the ruling class, a consequence by design, such institutions enjoy the use of all the easy state-created money they can ingest. Free banking crusaders of the Austrian style should know better than to think that such easy money as we have now is commensurate with the mutual money proposed by the individualist anarchists. Have the monopolistic restrictions on free banking, the privileges that prevent the laborer from capitalizing his wealth, actually been lifted, or have such privileges simply made way for the institutions that Professor Brooks seems to think have effectuated the dream of the anarchists? Are we to think that the existence and abundance of high-interest credit for the working poor is the vision that Tucker and Greene had with regard to credit? Even Rothbard understood that the first one to spend a counterfeit dollar enjoys the greatest boon, the rest finding their money depreciated. It therefore seems absurd to suggest that credit cards and payday advance loans for the working man, offered at a monopoly rate, are proof that widely available credit is incapable of destroying the tribute system called interest. There are hosts of products and services that are quite abundant, but are nevertheless priced far in excess of their true market value due to the interventions of just as abundant privileges.

Rothbard obscured a key argument of the “money-cranks” in ignoring the fact that Greene, Tucker and company did not advocate for inflation for its own sake, for simply splitting in two the money already in people’s hands and calling it doubled. Their argument was that restrictions on banking favored some people and fell disproportionately on others, so that access to credit was obstructed for most of the population. To merely inflate the money supply arbitrarily was not at all the goal, especially when the “easy money” we have under the existing banking system is “easy” only for politically connected institutions, particularly commercial banks—a fact that the Austrian, “End the Fed” crowd has quite right. As Tucker said of the greenback movement over one hundred years ago, national currency takes the money question and “degenerate[s] it into an unprincipled scramble for spoils by which the strongest would profit.”M It is difficult to understand why indeed workers, if allowed, would not offer one another credit at cost under a mutual banking system whereby they would all expect reciprocal treatment in kind somewhere down the line; such an agreement may be thought of as an insurance that credit will be available to the working community, the credit to be secured by all kinds of valuables. That such arrangement are not allowed doesn’t seem to bother those who bizarrely insist that if interest could ever be abolished, it would be so abolished by now. They must suppose that we have the free, competitive banking that Greene and Tucker recommended, which I suppose isn’t all that surprising. If individuals were left free to compete and organize, there’s no telling how many would enter the field of banking, or how many different schematics they would develop for that end. As John Beverley Robinson observed, banking is, after all, a “simple and safe business.”

With the capitalist banking apparatus as it is, crises like that of 2008, will not abate at least not for very long intervals. Capital and credit concentration gives way to complacency in business, to waste, to destitution for the people whose work hours drive industry forward even in spite of its unstable footing on which the economic system stands. That system works for the capitalists—is their great swindle—but only to the extent that it remains at all and doesn’t end up completely in ruins. Why those who defend some version of “free banking” should defend the tax—because that’s really what it is—of interest is utterly beyond my comprehension, but what it means is that it’s all the more important for libertarians to continue in the tradition of William B. Greene and Benjamin R. Tucker.