When I stand at the meat counter looking down at a pack of sirloin that is about 10% more expensive than it was two years ago, it does not occur to me to blame Larry Summers. Yet for David Dayen — a journalist whose work I admire — inflation is caused by free markets, and […]
Attack of the Cyber Monsters
Over the past year or so, you could be tipsy over all the tipping points that have flown past in in the saga of Big Tech v. its detractors. Pre the 2016 Russia US election cyberwar, only a few fringe groups were worrying about Big Tech monopoly power. Then the election hacking came to light, […]
Can the Tech Oligarchs become good guys again?
Two bad days in Congress didn’t scare Mark Zuckerberg into a profound spiritual and religious conversion. He has not renounced the material world. Zuckerberg seems to be the same smugly poised $64 billionaire that he was before Facebook had its month from hell. Still, although I spend a lot of time fretting about monopolistic technology […]
Radical Markets
A couple of fairly crazy, free-thinking professors have formulated a new ideology they call Radical Markets. I’ve read their book — it’s a bizarre but compelling amalgam of Henry George, Adam Smith and extremist libertarianism. One of their insane ideas is something along the lines that no one should own anything, but that property should always […]
The Commissioner of Competition
It is good to know that there is someone out there fighting back against anti-competitive, monopolistic practices. The worst offenders are companies with a liberal, socially conscious image: Apple, Facebook, Google. See this piece in The Economist about Margrethe Vesteger, the Danish competition commissioner of the EU.