Antimonopoly: A Master Narrative for What Ails the US and How to Fix It
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 13, 2022
CONTACT: Ashley Woolheater, woolheater@openmarketsinstitute.org
WASHINGTON - In a new piece published today in Democracy Journal, Open Markets Institute Executive Director Barry Lynn points Democrats to antimonopoly as a cohesive narrative for what ails the U.S. and how President Biden and Democrats are working to improve our country and build a better, fairer, more democratic world.
In the piece, published in advance of Democracy Day 2022 this Thursday, Lynn explains how antimonopoly is “a story that transports us from a defensive stance of fighting to protect specific “rights” to an offensive posture of building a new liberty for all Americans and a far better world in which to live."
“Much of the Democratic party has overlooked a simple way to explain the origins of today’s crises and to take practical actions to fix them. This has left the party as a whole without a coherent explanation for what has gone wrong in our country, has turned control of the debate over to the Republicans and the monopolists themselves, has left critical threats to our democracy largely unchallenged, and has contributed to the confusion and demoralization of most of the party… the only way to make the Democratic Party attractive to voters is to explain in simple terms who strip mined our wealth and wellbeing, and who let them do it.”
More than a better narrative alone to coalesce around, Democrats also need to rid themselves of shortsighted economic advisors like Larry Summers who continue to prioritize market efficiency (concentration), despite decades of evidence that efficiency alone produces a host of economic and political problems including dangerous supply chain concentration and bottlenecks - like we’ve seen exacerbated by the pandemic and exposing the US to the powers of China and Russia - declining wages, political malcontent, and the free flow of information crushed by the executives at Google and Facebook.
Instead of continuing to prioritize economic efficiency to great societal detriment, we can intentionally structuring corporations and markets to promote the liberty and wellbeing of the individual. We’ve done it before, Lynn explains: Historically, “the most immediate goal of antimonopoly law was to prevent any concentration of power or control that might restrict the liberty of individuals to make full use of all their properties – in the form of their ideas, skills, labor, personal businesses, personal capital, and capacity to reason.”
“Concentration of wealth and control in ever fewer hands, by its very nature, undermines fundamental balances of power,” Lynn writes. “Smart competition policy based on proven models can empower us to retake control over our own destiny, beginning now.”
Lynn’s piece expands on his 2020 book, “Liberty from All Masters,” and his 20-year vanguard study of how monopoly power threatens individual liberty, democracy, prosperity, and national security.
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The Open Markets Institute is a team of journalists, researchers, lawyers, economists, and advocates working together to expose and reverse the stranglehold that corporate monopolies have on our country.