State-corporate nexus

There should be a single term that describes the nexus of corporate and government interests. Many socialists, libertarians, mutualists, anarchists, and otherists will agree that a large share of our problems comes neither just from corporations (though also from them) nor just from government (though also from them), but particularly from the clash or alignment of interests, the nexus between them. While Marxists look for the dissolution of corporations, libertarians generally advocate for the reduction of the government sphere since, of the two, the government is the more dangerous. Each has its own power, but government is the only true wielder of force, violence, and coercion, and the corporation only accesses that through the state. The state can always access economic power through coercive taxation.

The most obvious case of that nexus, that of corporate welfare, is universally denounced by both citizens and politicians, but ubiquitously practiced by both major political parties (or both wings of the single major party, if you prefer). Less obvious cases are those regulations which appear to work against corporate interests, but actually serve to further some at the expense of others; for example, Wal-Mart's recent support for an increase in the minimum wage in order to keep their competitors at a disadvantage. We are all also familiar with sweetheart deals and no-bid contracts.

It is therefore unfortunate that there is no satisfactory, pithy, accurate, succinct single word that conveys the idea of the nexus itself. A few that come close, or that address the problem lack the precision (and concision? is that a word) are:

• Corporate welfare - This is an outcome, not a description of the phenomenon.
  
• State capitalism - It misses because it exploits dual nature of meaning of "capitalist" and somehow implies a link between capitalism and its opposite. Sometimes that is the intent of those using it. In case the reader is unaware, capitalist means both someone who makes a living on the rent of money (capital) and someone who advocates laissez faire economic policy. Ted Turner is the former but not the latter, I am the latter but not the former. By saying, "Ted Turner advocates thus-and-such, and Ted Turner is a capitalist," it is sometimes intended to imply that capitalists of the latter type favor the kinds of things that Ted Turner favors, which is silly.
  
• Corporative - This is a little obscure and archaic, but it comes close. After all, capital exists even in a communist society, though it may be underutilized, but corporations are a legal fiction, an offspring of the state. Corporatives in Italy (and for a time in America) were essentially guilds organized for the purpose of self-regulation. They were allowed to issue licenses to participate in their particular industry, to set maximum and minimum prices, and to negotiate with the labor guilds. It has the added benefit that the idea was successfully implemented by Mussolini and FDR, thus underlining the fact that such ideas are limited to neither the traditional left nor the traditional right (overlooking Mussolini's Marxist upbringing for the moment).
  
• Regulatory Capture - Another outcome, but a successful neologism would have to capture this aspect of the nexus, something that Corporative misses. Regulatory capture is the idea that regulated industries will soon gain control of the regulating body by one means or another. This is thought to be an unfortunate corruption of the regulatory system that can be prevented by righteous voting, but the history is such that it seems to be a natural but unintended consequence. The best background reading on regulatory capture are Gabriel Kolko's books, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, and Railroads and Regulation, 1877-1916. In those books, Kolko, a self-described socialist historian, argues that the supposed triumphs of the Progressive Era were exactly the opposite, that in fact the legislation that was supposedly written to contain the trusts over their protests were in fact requested by them in order to suppress competition. That was especially so for the railroad industry, which tried for years to stop the competition-driven rate reductions that were driving them all into bankruptcy first by cartelization then by regulation. Even this fails to capture the other aspect of capture, which is that regulated industries have concentrated interests in the outcome of regulatory rule-making processes, while the public's interests are diffuse. There is a public good problem which leads to rational ignorance on the part of voters and legislators. As a result, the regulated industries manage to influence the outcomes by a variety of means, including trading company officers to the regulatory boards and vice versa.
• Rent seeking - This would seem to capture some of the ideas above (corporate welfare and regulatory capture), but rent-seeking isn't restricted to businesses or governments. An employee who withholds critical information to maintain his job security is a rent seeker.
  

Perhaps we should follow the German example and simply graft words together, such as commoninterestofcorporationandgovernment? Combinationofeconomicandpoliticalpower? Paternalcorporativelink? Seriously, "corporative patronage"?