“You Can Put the Monopoly Tiger in a Cage but You Cannot Transform a Tiger Into a Vegan” — TheMarket interviews Luigi G. Zingales

Even from a conservative point of view, the concentration of power at large tech companies is scary. As a true conservative, you’re afraid of the constitutional power in the government. Not because the government is evil per se, but because you don’t trust human nature and concentration of power. So if you have the same concentration of power in the private sector it doesn’t become fine all of a sudden. If anything, it becomes more dangerous. At least, we have ways to address the concentration of power in the public sector. In contrast, we have none in the private sector, especially with regard to such large companies like Google and Facebook where the control is in the hands of only three people because of the dual stock class structure. In the case of Google, they are Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at Facebook it’s Mark Zuckerberg....

How to deal with natural monopolies.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
“You Can Put the Monopoly Tiger in a Cage but You Cannot Transform a Tiger Into a Vegan”

TheMarket interviews Luigi G. Zingales, professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

What Do the Oligarchs Have in Mind for Us? — Joel Koltin

Does technology lead to technocracy and is technocracy a form of feudalism?

Technocracy and its tendency toward neo-feudalism is based on ownership of natural monopolies. Natural monopolies are candidates for anti-trust action.

The New Geography
What Do the Oligarchs Have in Mind for Us?

Joel Koltin

John Quiggin — We are all socialists now

Socialism is much more than public ownership of productive enterprises. Still, if there is one policy that clearly distinguishes socialists from their (or rather our) opponents, it is support for public enterprise as a way of organizing large-scale production, and, in particular, as the preferred model for industries characterized by natural monopoly or other major market failures. The opposite view, dominant since the 1970s, is the market liberal framework that favors comprehensive private ownership, with “light-handed” regulation as the response to market “imperfections”.

Now that I’ve explicitly adopted the term “socialist”, I’ve been struck by the fact that I seem to be pushing against an open door....

As a socialist, I support a mixed economy in which both public and private ownership play important roles. The evidence of the past century shows, in my view, that most large-scale infrastructure should be publicly owned, and operate on a statutory authority model, accountable to the public through governments, but with politicians kept at arms length from day-to-day decisions. On the other hand, small business should be left to private ownership. That leaves a large share of the economy to balance between large for-profit corporations and public enterprise. The design of a mixed economy involves getting that balance right.

In my view, feudalism is a socio-economic system that prioritizes land (control of territory) as a factor of production. Capitalism is a socio-economic system that prioritizes capital (ownership). Socialism is an socio-economic system that prioritizes workers (people).

John Quiggin's Blog

We are all socialists now
John Quiggin | Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government