This robber baron schema is also, under different labels, the socialist plan. The difference between a corporate state monopoly and a socialist state monopoly is essentially only the identity of the group controlling the power structure. The essence of socialism is monopoly control by the state using hired planners and academic sponges. On the other hand, Rockefeller, Morgan, and their corporate friends aimed to acquire and control their monopoly and to maximize its profits through influence in the state political apparatus; this, while it still needs hired planners and academic sponges, is a discreet and far more subtle process than outright state ownership under socialism. Success for the Rockefeller gambit has depended particularly upon focusing public attention upon largely irrelevant and superficial historical creations, such as the myth of a struggle between capitalists and communists, and careful cultivation of political forces by big business. We call this phenomenon of corporate legal monopoly — market control acquired by using political influence — by the name of corporate socialism.The most lucid and frank description of corporate socialism and its mores and objectives is to be found in a 1906 booklet by Frederic Clemson Howe, Confessions of a Monopolist [...]:
"This is the story of something for nothing — of making the other fellow pay. This making the other fellow pay, of getting something for nothing, explains the lust for franchises, mining rights, tariff privileges, railway control, tax evasions. All these things mean monopoly, and all monopoly is bottomed on legislation. And monopoly laws are born in corruption. The commercialism of the press, or education, even of sweet charity, is part of the price we pay for the special privileges created by law. The desire of something for nothing, of making the other fellow pay, of monopoly in some form or other, is the cause of corruption. Monopoly and corruption are cause and effect. Together, they work in Congress, in our Commonwealths, in our municipalities. It is always so. It always has been so. Privilege gives birth to corruption, just as the poisonous sewer breeds disease. Equal chance, a fair field and no favors, the "square deal" are never corrupt. They do not appear in legislative halls nor in Council Chambers. For these things mean labor for labor, value for value, something for something. This is why the little business man, the retail and wholesale dealer, the jobber, and the manufacturer are not the business men whose business corrupts politics."
Howe's opposite to this system of corrupt monopoly is described as "labor for labor, value for value, something for something." But these values are also the essential hall marks of a market system, that is, a purely competitive system, where market clearing prices are established by impartial interaction of supply and demand in the market place. Such an impartial system cannot, of course, be influenced or corrupted by politics. The monopoly economic system based on corruption and privilege described by Howe is a politically run economy. It is at the same time also a system of disguised forced labor, called by Ludwig von Mises the Zwangswirtschaft, a system of compulsion. It is this element of compulsion that is common to all politically run economies: Hitler's New Order, Mussolini's corporate state, Kennedy's New Frontier, Johnson's Great Society, and Nixon's Creative Federalism. Compulsion was also an element in Herbert Hoover's reaction to the depression and much more obviously in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the National Recovery Administration.
[...] In modern America the most significant illustration of society as a whole working for the few is the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. The Federal Reserve System is, in effect, a private banking monopoly, not answerable to Congress or the public, but with legal monopoly control over money supply without let or hindrance or even audit by the General Accounting Office. More HERE
