He wasn’t talking about North Carolina’s government subsidies for renewable energy, but he could have been.

University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales detailed the woes associated with crony capitalism during his John W. Pope Lecture Wednesday night at N.C. State University.

The North Carolina application? An industry that survives only through government subsidies — and spends much of its time and energy (no pun intended) working to keep those subsidies — isn’t spending enough time and energy on improving its products and services to make them competitive in the marketplace.