Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
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"Many blame today's economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? [This book] turns this thinking--and pretty much all conventional thinking about markets, both for and against--on its head. The book reveals...new ways to organize markets for the good of everyone. It shows how the emancipatory force of genuinely open, free, and competitive markets can reawaken the dormant nineteenth-century spirit of liberal reform and lead to greater equality, prosperity, and cooperation. [The authors] demonstrate why private property is inherently monopolistic, and how we would all be better off if private ownership were converted into a public auction for public benefit. They show how the principle of one person, one vote inhibits democracy, suggesting instead an ingenious way for voters to effectively influence the issues that matter most to them. They argue that every citizen of a host country should benefit from immigration--not just migrants and their capitalist employers. They propose leveraging antitrust laws to liberate markets from the grip of institutional investors and creating a data labor movement to force digital monopolies to compensate people for their electronic data. Only by radically expanding the scope of markets can we reduce inequality, restore robust economic growth, and resolve political conflicts. But to do that, we must replace our most sacred institutions with truly free and open competition--[this book] shows how."--
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The main problem with this book is that it tends to look at evil, and rather than eradicating the evil, seeks to feed it in such a way that they hope it will be less awful. The immigration system is fraught with inefficiencies? Allow any person to import an immigrant labour and pay them less than the minimum wage as an indentured servant - it's ethical(TM) because this is already a thing under au pair visas in the US and the Arab world. Data logging by companies is intrusive and makes them powerful enough to manipulate democracies? Make them pay you in exchange for even greater intrusions. I think the most damning illustration of this is how often variations of this phrase show up in the book: “[the thing we just proposed] might be compared to slavery, wrongly in our opinion”.
The authors are fundamentally unwilling to accept what their own data is showing them. That said, they do offer an occasional interesting idea, and while many of these are unachievable (weighted per-issue voting in a participatory mass-democracy with a sort of tradeable 'voting credits' budget per voter), some of them do have promise (i.e. forbidding a company from owning interests in more than one area of a vertical market, but allowing them to own things in many markets).
All in all, the book might be worth it as a look at “problem areas”, even if it tends to get the problem itself wrong.