So, useful article online in Harpers.
Killing the Competition: How the New Monopolies are Destroying Open Markets
I've been struggling for a while now trying to figure out how to articulate some of the issues I see with the current state of our economic system and free markets (to use the term loosely). This is is good thought piece and serves as one framework to understand some of the current impediments to growth. Sometimes it seems to me we're spending most of our national economic policy efforts in reconfiguring our society and culture into one large no-risk cash machine benefiting a relatively small number of large corporations.
This article also offers a sobering description of the impact on small companies of “Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts” where, in my words, large companies can play small companies off against each other resulting in economic win-lose, not win-win scenarios. Disproportionally higher returns to larger aggregations of capital, I suppose one could say.
Money quote:
Today, our overlords not only refuse to defend the power they hold—they deny that it is even possible for any American to accumulate such power. And to make such an absurd claim stick, they (or the more politically sophisticated of the academic economists in their employ) have undermined our language itself. Their most impressive act of lexical legerdemain was the coinage of various misnomers, some so audacious as to be worthy of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Corporate monopoly? Let’s just call that the “free market.” The political ravages of corporate power? Those could be recast as the essentially benign workings of “market forces.”
