Not sure why you find it necessary to draw such a firm distinction between subsidies, tariffs and the many other ways that firms can obtain advantages via crony

Not sure why you find it necessary to draw such a firm distinction between subsidies, tariffs and the many other ways that firms can obtain advantages via crony capitalist schemes created in cahoots with sympathetic (if not corrupt) regulators. Firms are going to be clever and will find ways to have laws passed that give them advantages over other firms. This is one reason Zuck said he thinks Facebook should be regulated. As the biggest player in the space, Facebook can afford to hire the lawyers and additional staff necessary to comply with such regulation. Smaller firms on the other hand will be less able to afford this and so the regulation serves as a barrier to competition that insulates Facebook from competition. Government crony deals come in all different shapes and sizes. In the early 2000s the government gave a big handout to oil companies by changing the accounting rules, allowing the firms to sell lots of oil at a massive profit without having to claim the profit, since they could suddenly consider the "cost" of the oil based on LIFO rather than FIFO. This small change gifted the industry with billions of dollars that would otherwise have been paid in corporate tax. You might think that all these crony deals are a good thing and are just capitalism in action. Quite the contrary. Firms should be innovating better products and services, not figuring out ways to come up with sweet deals with regulators that give them advantages and steal from society or unfairly harm smaller, non-incumbent firms. And to be sure, whenever those policies can be framed as being essential to national security, they will be, as this helps make the crony capitalism harder for the average person to spot and lets the jingoistic ideal of "helping our firms vs foreign firms" be the focal point.