This excerpt originally appeared in The Examiner on July 8, 2012.

And now academia's free-market players are getting in on the game, beginning to rebuild the intellectual infrastructure to argue against corporatism. George Mason University's Mercatus Center this week is kicking off a series of papers on cronyism and business-government collusion. "The Pathology of Privilege: The Economic Consequences of Government Favoritism," written by Mercatus senior research fellow Matt Mitchell, is the first installment.