Well, not exactly the "new" monopoly capitalism, rather the new improved monopoly capitalism.
I see the true populists on the left and the true populists on the right. I believe that those groups can absolutely come together and fight monopolists and restore democracy within our economy and within our political system. Because what they actually believe in is a distribution of power foremost. They believe in open markets, foremost. And what they’re aiming at is the distribution of power and the open and fair markets. And if you establish that, then you have real democracy. You have real liberty.
The problem with most of the libertarians—and certainly with the libertarians who are official libertarians, meaning they work with the Libertarian Party, they work with libertarian operations like the Cato Institute—is that they say we need to get rid of all regulation. We need to get rid of all government.
The true populists — what they understood is that, well, you might not want to use government to fix all your ills. You might not want to use government to fix even most of your ills. But what you do need is, you need to have government to keep yourself free. To keep markets open, to prevent the consolidation of power over markets by monopolists. If you don’t have government, then every single system will be taken over by a private monopolist, which really means private government….
The purpose of government, the reason we founded government, is to break up dangerous concentrations of power at home and abroad. Concentrations of power that threaten our liberty as individuals at home and abroad. That is the foremost purpose of government.Truthout
How the New Monopoly Capitalism Will Crush You to Smithereens
Alternet's Lynn Parramore interviews Barry Lynn, senior fellow at the New America Foundation, where he directs the Markets, Enterprise, and Resiliency Initiative.
8 comments:
If Lynn thinks the only source of economic injustice and inequality is monopoly and unfair competition, he needs to think more about the mathematics of capital accumulation and the dynamics of capitalism.
This is the major lesson of Piketty. The problem isn't just market imperfection.
"The purpose of government, the reason we founded government, is to break up dangerous concentrations of power at home and abroad. Concentrations of power that threaten our liberty as individuals at home and abroad."
So we created government to protect liberty? Meanwhile all the libertarians hate govt?.... I dont know about this from Lynn here...
Govt seems to be an institution we created to administer human authority imo, but I am not libertarian... so Lynn may be looking at this as a libertarian...
rsp
Dan, I would say that a lot of it is economic rent.
Michael Hudson makes a pretty good case that the imbalance of capital and labor can be corrected by not taxing productive activity but rather taxing away economic rent both as a way to rebalance and to discourage rent seeking attitudes and behaviors.
As a practical matter, I think it is a lot more feasible politically to attack economic rent and rent seeking instead of a frontal assault on capitalism.
Not that I don't think that capitalism is the fundamental problem and eventually needs to be transcended.
Matt, I have reservations about the generality of his claims, too, but I would say he is largely correct wrt to the American Revolution and founding of the United States based on the process of developing the founding documents. This was a result of Enlightenment social and political philosophy, especially John Locke. Liberalism was in ascendancy at this time. But this was pretty much new thinking at the time, but it was not entirely new in that it was present in Athenian thinking in ancient Greece.
Tom, economic rent in the end is just return to capital as opposed to the return to labor. Capitalism is a system built on the proposition that the owners of means of production should be able to derive income from the sheer ownership of those capital assets, independently of any actual labor they do in the productive process. To get rid of rent would be to get rid of capitalism.
These calls for a libertarian-left alliance are alwasy popping up, especially during foreign crises as the isolationist wings of both the left and right seek to find common ground. They are alwasy based economically on the erroneous idea that the core of economic inequality and oppression stems from market imperfections and the failure to achieve true and pure capitalism. Very misguided in my opinion.
As Hudson expains it, economic rent is excess over return to capital based on production cost including cost of capital. Being unnecessary operationally, it is inefficient and reduces effectiveness of capital. It is parasitical and exploitive. It's part of the privilege of ownership accruing from power rather than return on ownership for productive contribution.
Rent is a charged term. In general economic transactions are positive sum games which produce a surplus. The expectation that wages would rise in proportion to a rise in productivity means that labor's percentage of that surplus would remain the same. But in recent decades the increases in the surplus have gone to capital, not labor, in the US and other nations.
Now, if the share of capital is rent, then taxing the rent away does sound like it would abolish capitalism. OTOH, the appropriation of the share of labor by capital is at the very least unhealthy for society. Why not tax those gains away?
How labor can regain ground is not obvious, but it has been done before.
Previously, labor was occasionally allowed to impose rent by increasing labor bargaining power through unions, but when that happens capital always seeks to eradicate this power as a distortion of the free market.
Under neoliberalism, capital's distorting the "free market" though imposition of rents is OK, labor not.
In addition, there was legislation and regulation that reduced rent seeking, e.g., anti-trust against monopoly, monopsony, and oligopoly. That, too, has been eliminated through deregulation.
Nationalization of public goods and public utilities was also used, and that has been countered with privatization.
Neoliberalism is basically about capital being free to seek all the rent it can extract and making labor unable to do so, as well as preventing government from interfering with rent seeking.
So either eliminate rents through taxing it away or destroying power that leads to rent by legislation and regulation and nationalization, or equalize rent extraction by the factors through increasing labor power to make it competitive with capital.
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