Free-market Ideology

The May 9th NYTimes has an Op-Ed essay, It’s Time to Break Up Facebook, by Chris Hughes, the co-founder of Facebook, calling on the government to break up that company. The essay is very thorough in describing the current monopoly behavior of Facebook, the deleterious effects on competition and vigor in --->> read more -->>

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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 -->>