Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

Hardly. I mean it does look that way at first, but as long as there are good competitors around, the price of SaaS products won't be exorbitant. Besides, technology seems to have a very cyclical progression: we went from time sharing computing on big vendors' computers, to personal computing, and now back to hosting with big vendors, via cloud. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that future progress would once again make having one's data with oneself more attractive.

Knowingly providing incentives for people to do something unethical is itself unethical.

The corporations aren't blameless here.

Since you seem knowledgeable about this, what is the amount of credit card debt available to the median American above what they already carry?

That perspective is whole ignorant of the consequences of not having a mechanism for protecting people's outputs and value. Are you incented to work if someone else gets paid for that work? Why would you think that is any different with regard to patents, copyrights, and trademarks, etc.

I get that there are abuses and even grotesque distortions, but that theory is fully and clearly false. Yes, you should have protection, no you should not have abusive protecting as it exists right now in basically every single field and sector.

No, you should not be allowed to lease mineral rights and then just sit on them for free. No you should not be able to copyright something essentially forever. No, patents should not even be awarded for basic inevitable things that a corporations simply had the financial ability to copyright first. No, you should not be able to keep exponential gains from the value and environment a society created without also paying exponential taxes to compensate and contribute due to that success. But there has to be a fundamental right and ability to keep the value from what one has earned and created. That may seem an anathema to the recent generation infested by communism and ideologically subverted by islam, but the alternative is the collapse of society.

Many of our regulatory bodies have been utterly captured by biggest companies that they are supposed to regulate, and they are tamping down innovation (which creates jobs), increasing prices, and decreasing quality. Both the Democrats and Republicans have been engaging too heavily in crony capitalism for decades, and this is the result.

How it works: Regulations that are supposed to protect the public end up being a cudgel with which to beat down small companies that can't afford to deal with an onslaught of often unjustified demands for regulatory compliance. When the only companies who can afford to comply are the big ones, it squeezes out new market entrants. This decreases competition. It's bad for all but a handful of people.

How it should work: Generally (not always), there should be a direct relationship between company size and the amount of regulations which apply (i.e. more regulations as you get bigger, fewer if you're small).

We need a heavy injection of honesty into our regulatory agencies. Restoring balance to the system would unleash a wave of economic growth.

When I was shilling for Senator Sanders in 2015 and 2016, I often said that I was equally excited for both his policies and the fact that he would make a lot of good appointments, which would clean a lot of crap out the rent-seeking regulatory system, which would be great for the economy.

Unfortunately, we're going to have to wait. But I hope this gets on more people's radars as one of the reasons why the middle class has been shrinking and real incomes going down for four straight decades.