Phil Ebersole: The solution to this problem, [Elizabeth] Warren said, is simply to enforce the anti-trust laws as originally written.
The reason that they aren’t is a neoliberal philosophy of business regulation that took hold in the late 1970s, which held that the most important thing was not competition, but business efficiency. If Amazon can serve customers more efficiently that a local bookstore, then, according to this idea, there was no reason for the local bookstore to exist.
That could be true only if Amazon, Wal-Mart, Comcast and other big corporations were owned and operated by altruists, who passed along the gains in economic efficiency to customers, workers, suppliers and the local community.
But even when consolidation produces economic efficiency that benefits consumers, economic efficiency isn’t everything. Concentration of economic power means concentration of political power, which results in the kind of dysfunctional economic system we have now.…Monopoly power = monopoly rent
Monopoly rent is one of the chief forms of rent along with profit as surplus value, land rent, and financial rent.
Rent extraction is based on market power and market power is based on political power.
Somewhat ironically, government is both a source of political influence that enable special interests to garner market power and also a level of power through all, such as anti-trust, regulation, such as the which controls negative externality, and public goods and public utilities that provide goods that are more effectively and efficiently provided publicly than privately.
Beverly Mann: This movement, our movement, which began in the fall of 2011 with Occupy Wall Street, is on track to cause a political and economic earthquake.
The Irish Review
Markets and states are complements
Kevin O'Rourke
ht Brad DeLong
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