Liberty from All Masters

July 15, 2020
An examination of our fall into the economic pit crafted by Amazon, Google, et al.--and ideas for how to crawl out. Lynn, the founder and CEO of the Open Markets Institute, pulls few punches in his grim analysis of the current enormous economic sway exercised by monopolies. The author laments the loss of a bright American past when people owned stores (not franchises), farms, and other enterprises now controlled by global corporations bound by few restrictions. Lynn, who has published two other books on this subject, including Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction (2010), provides the historical contexts for his positions and offers a wide array of discussion on the influential thinking (good and bad) of men including Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Bork, and countless others. Though liberal, Lynn does not hesitate to criticize Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders who failed to do anything about the economic threats posed by Walmart, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other behemoths. He also places a chunk of blame on Ronald Reagan--who had a significant role in "overthrowing America's traditional system of capitalism"--and his Republican successors, especially Donald Trump, whose presidency "has been an almost flawless catastrophe." The author's solid foundation of reading and research backs up his sage analysis. He seems to have read every relevant essay and book on the subject and has extracted the passages that best illuminate his points. Lynn worries that we have little time for remedies, which require legislative as well as judicial action. He ends with a warning and an exhortation: "Do nothing and our world ends....We have but one way forward. Only the American System of Liberty provides us with the intellectual, institutional, psychological, technological, and spiritual tools that will enable us to break the powers that bind us and to build a world fit for our children and their children. Admonitory, cautionary, and essential.

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August 31, 2020
Open Markets Institute director Lynn (Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction) contends in this forceful and well-documented account that shifts in regulating monopolies that began in the 1980s and ’90s have led to today’s economic and political woes. For the bulk of American history, Lynn writes, so-called “common carrier” laws ensured “that any corporation that controlled access to a vital service treated every person who depended on that monopoly the same.” But when “neoliberal reactionaries” in the Reagan and Clinton administrations rolled back these and other regulations, the road was paved for Amazon, Facebook, and Google to amass unprecedented power “by deliver to each of us different information, different prices, different services.” Drawing on the personal information consumers provide, these companies and other “platform monopolists” now have the ability, Lynn argues, to “manipulate” Americans “to a degree that no previous private power, in any nation, has ever come close to achieving.” He dives deep into antitrust law, trade policy, electoral politics, economic theory, and legislative history to make his case, but doesn’t provide much in the way of a practical path forward. Still, this is an eye-opening and persuasive defense of robust antitrust enforcement as essential to the core principles of American democracy.