Wednesday, December 5, 2018

Jonathan Tepper — Competition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It

We need a revolution to cast off monopolies and restore entrepreneurial freedom. First of two excerpts from “The Myth of Capitalism.”
Bloomberg Opinion
Competition Is Dying, and Taking Capitalism With It
Jonathan Tepper

See also a short review of The Myth of Capitalism
A lot of times, when you read reviews about books on the economy, you end up wondering what the reviewer’s ‘priors’ are as people like to say in economics. You read the review and wonder where the biases of the reviewer are, because that can tell you a lot about the review.

So I’m going to lay it out there.
The ‘Corporatist’ is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in liberty. He uses terminology based in liberty to construct an ideology solely as a means of furthering the gains of a specific strata of society allied with the corporatist and at the expense of other strata, by coercion if necessary.
That’s me, seven years ago on this very website in a post I called Corporatism masquerading as Liberty. So, those are my priors coming into this; I’m someone who sees the ‘ideology’ of freedom and liberty being used as a cloak and shield for people who are almost entirely self-interested. And what I believe has happened is that ideology has been injected into our form of capitalism as a way of disarming naysayers and allowing the ‘Corporatist’ to benefit at everyone’s expense.
So when I read “The Myth of Capitalism" (henceforth The MOC) was subtitled “Monopolies and the Death of Competition", I was intrigued because the question for me was how self-interested people are able to reap all the gains of our system, while avoiding a lot of the downsides....
econintersect
"The Myth Of Capitalism"
Edward Harrison, Credit Writedowns

See also

"Freedom" at the tip of a missile. Making the world "safe" for capitalism American style, or else.

AntiWar
Pompeo Promises New Liberal World Order – New Wine In Old Bottles?
Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams

See also
Huawei chief financial officer Wanzhou Meng is facing extradition to the United States after being arrested in Canada on suspicion of violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, the Globe and Mail reports.
Making the world safe.

Axios
Zachary Basu

also
Mere hours after Chinese officials finally affirmed President Trump's description of Saturday's trade 'truce' - this after fears that the true nature of the agreement might have been "lost in translation" helped trigger the worst one-day market selloff since October - the DOJ has gone ahead and kicked the hornet's nest, seriously jeopardizing the prospects for a prolonged trade detente between the world's two biggest economies....
Zero Hedge
Trade Truce Over? Canada Arrests Huawei CFO At US Request
Tyler Durden

1 comment:

Konrad said...

I have said all along that neoliberalism is anti-competition, and therefore anti-capitalism. It is anti-free market. It wants owned and controlled markets. It wants monopolies and rent extraction.

Everything neoliberals say is the Orwellian opposite of the truth.

The opposite of capitalism is not socialism, but neoliberalism (i.e. feudalism). True capitalism cannot exist without at least some degree of socialism (i.e. public regulation).

Neoliberals want zero public regulation. Neoliberals want to regulate the public. They call themselves libertarians, meaning they want the freedom to enslave, exploit, murder and pillage. Freedom to destroy the world in their quest for power and profit.

“The ‘Corporatist’ is a kleptocrat masquerading as a believer in liberty.”

He believes in liberty. Liberty for himself, and slavery for everyone else.

If anyone thinks that I oversimplify, then he or she has drunk the neoliberal kool-aid.