In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says....
A different take on "socialism" and how to implement it using markets in addition to government.
Good read. It's the basis of a proposal that is set forth in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
Q: You criticize the left and the right for drawing ideas from old modes of political and economic thinking. What should both do different?
I think the problem with the right is that it believes in the free market, which we absolutely believe in, but it doesn’t know what the market really is or what it requires to have a free market. It assumes that by going backwards to a totally monopolized and retrograde form of markets we’re going to get the dynamic free market of the future, which I think is deeply naïve and mistaken. I think they have a good goal in mind, having a truly free and competitive system, but they created systems that ignored the ways in which what they called markets actually led to concentrated forms of power, very similar to the forms of state power that they decried.
The left, on the other hand, also has good aims. It believes in greater equality and believes in breaking up concentrated corporate power, but it thinks it can trust in benevolent state actors to impartially execute this, which to me is just as naïve as trusting corporate actors or the owners of private property to somehow benevolently have the public interest in mind. Like the left, we want to reduce inequality, diffuse power more broadly, and have a more profound democracy, but we think that standard discretionary state power is a perfect way to reestablish the tyranny of the elite, precisely the same sort of oppression that they’re trying to alleviate....The proposal is a form of public choice but differs from what now goes by the name of public choice theory.
ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Glen Weyl: “The Very Structure of Capitalism Is Inherently Monopolistic”
Asher Schechter interviews Glen Weyl
2 comments:
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This article is an example of the nonsense claim that neoliberals “mean well,” but they are “misguided.”
FROM THE ARTICLE: “I think the problem with the right is that it believes in the free market, which we absolutely believe in, but it doesn’t know what the market really is or what it requires to have a free market. It assumes that by going backwards to a totally monopolized and retrograde form of markets we’re going to get the dynamic free market of the future, which I think is deeply naïve and mistaken.”
Please. Neoliberals are not "naïve and mistaken." Neoliberals are anti-free market. For neoliberals a “free market” means an owned and controlled market -- e.g. a monopoly. Neoliberals want to own everything and everyone. There is no freedom in being owned, or in being shackled by debt.
Everything that neoliberals say is the opposite of what they believe, and the opposite of the truth. There is nothing “naïve and mistaken” about neoliberal lies, greed and selfishness.
FROM THE ARTICLE: “I think they have a good goal in mind, having a truly free and competitive system, but they created systems that ignored the ways in which what they called markets actually led to concentrated forms of power, very similar to the forms of state power that they decried.”
Again we see the nonsense claim that neoliberals “mean well.” Neoliberals are like the bloodthirsty warmongers who made war on Vietnam. Apologists for that war claim that the lying psychopaths had “good intentions,” but they made “mistakes.” Bullshyte!
FROM THE ARTICLE: “The left, on the other hand, also has good aims. It believes in greater equality and believes in breaking up concentrated corporate power, but it thinks it can trust in benevolent state actors to impartially execute this, which to me is just as naïve as trusting corporate actors or the owners of private property to somehow benevolently have the public interest in mind.”
The article does not clarify who is “the left.” Some leftists sincerely want equality. However other leftists (e.g. the #MeToo maniacs) want all men to be castrated. They want all straight, white, non-Jewish males enslaved. They want all of the rights and none of the responsibilities. They intolerantly demand “tolerance,” meaning they want to rule as tyrants.
Right-wingers are consistent in their evil and their pathologies. But when we talk about the “left” we need to be very clear about exactly who we are talking about.
I have not read this book, I don't think it is published yet, but I am aware of its existence.
Its other author is Eric Posner of Chicago Law.
These guys are neoliberals. In fact they are in the vanguard of neoliberal thought.
As such I strongly suspect that they are not offering a different take on how to implement Socialism, they are offering a different take on how to undermine and co-opt it.
Nevertheless, we should all read this book--with a very critical eye--so as to know what may be headed our way in future. If their other writings are any guide it will be very interesting too.
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