Free-market Ideology

The Dalio Critique of Capitalism – Part One Ray Dalio, number 79 on Bloomberg’s list of the  100 wealthiest people on the planet with a net worth of 18+ billion $s, published an essay on LinkedIn, “Why and How Capitalism Needs to Be Reformed (Parts 1 & 2)” is US --->> read more -->>

In our continuing effort to find varied sources to illustrate the power of marketing and the costs of unregulated capitalism we return to John Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight for his segment on sugar in food. The food industry continues to put sugar in nearly every processed food and fights --->> read more -->>

We have written earlier (for example our article The Monopolization of America) about the increasing concentration of market power    In the hands of just a few corporations. This is a phenomenon occurring  throughout the US economy (really more broadly across the globe). Here is an 11 minute review of --->> read more -->>

American higher education, once the envy of the world, is continuing to slump towards a becoming a factory for debtors. With falling public tax support around the country for our two and four year colleges and universities, students are underwriting the enormous growth in tuition and administrators’ salaries with student --->> read more -->>

Adam Smith discussed the harms caused by monopolies in the frequently, ritualistically cited book, The Wealth of Nations. The progressive politics of the end of the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th was marked by a deep reaction to the monopolistic practices of large companies then. This --->> read more -->>

Plastic packaging is swamping the world with refuse that never degrades and flows into mountains of trash in land dumps and pollutes the oceans. For example, the bottled water industry produces over 50 billion bottles per year for the American market alone. Roughly 38 billion are not recycled and end --->> read more -->>

Heart Stents, Tricycles, and an Argument for Consumer Protections (Regulations) A staple of Republican and many Democratic politicians is to bemoan government regulations. These intrusions on individual liberty and free markets are claimed to be part of the giant regulatory state that chokes off innovation, initiative, and competition. The need --->> read more -->>

Corporate concentration of income and wealth are core features of capitalism. From its earliest chroniclers and cheerleaders like Adam Smith, the drive for corporations to get ever larger and in the doing drive their competitors out of the market was noted and warned against. In the US, the late 19th --->> read more -->>

The New Digital Monopoly Capitalism Capitalism has always been marked by relentless growth, the destruction of smaller businesses by larger, and ultimately the creation of oligopoly and monopoly corporations. From the earliest descriptions of capitalism, even by proponents like Adam Smith, this tendency towards concentration was warned against. In the --->> read more -->>

Stagnant Wages, New York Times, and Unions The 1/10/18 NYTimes article, Where Did Your Pay Raise Go? It May Have Become a Bonus by Patricia Cohen takes note of the long term trend of corporations awarding employees bonuses instead of pay raises. Here is the story in one chart: The --->> read more -->>

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Team Up to Try to Disrupt Health Care There was quite a bit of talk over the last couple of days about CEOs Bezos, Buffet, and Dimon teaming up to take on rising healthcare costs. The NYTimes weighed in with their story, “Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway --->> read more -->>

Structure of Jobs Is Changing Rapidly – Political System Failing to Address Issue A recent NPR story, “Freelanced: The Rise Of The Contract Workforce” based on the  NPR/Marist poll January 2018: Picture of Work shows that 1 in 5 jobs are now contract jobs. Here are the key findings reported: --->> read more -->>

A Note on Jobs & Unemployment Original publication date – 12/27/2016; Revised – 12/31/2017 As the presidential campaign of 2016 fades away and the Trump Era begins, we find a national scene without any real discussion of the facts of jobs and unemployment and what the future might bring. Trump --->> read more -->>

Recently Noted – Robert Reich: how we got into this mess and how we get out of it This is a good description of how we got into our current mess; the way out is weaker. Nevertheless, well worth the six minute view. A few thoughts To be clear the --->> read more -->>

Market Automaticity A central feature of free-market, neoliberal ideology is the automaticity of the market, the self-regulating market. As I describe in my keynote essay, “What Is Market Capitalism and Why Do We Need to Understand It?“: The market mechanism mobilizes capital investment assigning it to best uses, provides automatic --->> read more -->>

Inequality in the World – findings Inequality in wealth and income is not a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, recent decades in the US, and as this new report World Inequality Report 2018 shows, the world has seen a real explosion in inequality. As shown in the charts below the US is --->> read more -->>

Capitalism, Monopoly, Oligopoly and John Oliver Capitalism does a number of things very well. Concentrating power, wealth and income is one of them. Though we naturally focus our attention on wealthy individuals, fat cats, tycoons, money bags, but corporations, the legal entities with personhood (at least in the US) are --->> read more -->>

The American food industry led the way in the 20th century with the introduction of processed foods that feature lots of salt, sugar (including refined white flour) and fat converted into products that launched us on the earliest mass experiments with obesity, diabetes, hypertension and other chronic illnesses. The promotion --->> read more -->>

The New York Times has a piece this Sunday (7/30/17) by the well-known former Bush II economics advisor Greg Mankiw, “Why Healthcare Policy Is So Hard”. The article broadly acknowledges what every other developed country has recognized for decades, healthcare is not a good candidate for market control. Interesting that --->> read more -->>

The American Society of Civil Engineers has released another of their series of infrastructure report cards.

Capitalism is driven by a single internal logic that requires the transformation of people and nature into commodities to produce profits. This logic is amoral and the system, excepting for external controls by government and social institutions, just churns on. Despite the enormous increase in the economic output over the --->> read more -->>

Innovation is at the heart of capitalism We have been constantly told this for so long that it is now an assumption that has become an accepted fact. On the other hand, government is slow-footed, clumsy, bureaucratic, rule bound and the antithesis of innovative. This is the flip side of --->> read more -->>