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Glen Weyl: “The Very Structure of Capitalism Is Inherently Monopolistic” — Asher Schechter interviews Glen Weyl

Summary:
In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says.... A different take on "socialism" and how to implement it using markets in addition to government. Good read. It's the basis of a proposal that is set forth in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society. Q: You criticize the left and the right for drawing ideas from old modes of political and economic thinking. What should both do different? I think the

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In an interview with ProMarket, Glen Weyl, co-author of the wildly ambitious (and wildly controversial) new book Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, talks about antitrust, data as labor, and why he thinks the free market system is not actually free. “The entire business community has been speaking with one voice in the common interest of capital as a class,” he says....
A different take on "socialism" and how to implement it using markets in addition to government.

Good read. It's the basis of a proposal that is set forth in Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society.
Q: You criticize the left and the right for drawing ideas from old modes of political and economic thinking. What should both do different?
I think the problem with the right is that it believes in the free market, which we absolutely believe in, but it doesn’t know what the market really is or what it requires to have a free market. It assumes that by going backwards to a totally monopolized and retrograde form of markets we’re going to get the dynamic free market of the future, which I think is deeply naïve and mistaken. I think they have a good goal in mind, having a truly free and competitive system, but they created systems that ignored the ways in which what they called markets actually led to concentrated forms of power, very similar to the forms of state power that they decried.
The left, on the other hand, also has good aims. It believes in greater equality and believes in breaking up concentrated corporate power, but it thinks it can trust in benevolent state actors to impartially execute this, which to me is just as naïve as trusting corporate actors or the owners of private property to somehow benevolently have the public interest in mind. Like the left, we want to reduce inequality, diffuse power more broadly, and have a more profound democracy, but we think that standard discretionary state power is a perfect way to reestablish the tyranny of the elite, precisely the same sort of oppression that they’re trying to alleviate....
The proposal is a form of public choice but differs from what now goes by the name of public choice theory.
ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Glen Weyl: “The Very Structure of Capitalism Is Inherently Monopolistic”
Asher Schechter interviews Glen Weyl
Mike Norman
Mike Norman is an economist and veteran trader whose career has spanned over 30 years on Wall Street. He is a former member and trader on the CME, NYMEX, COMEX and NYFE and he managed money for one of the largest hedge funds and ran a prop trading desk for Credit Suisse.

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