Liberty from All Masters
The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Barry C. Lynn, one of America's preeminent thinkers, provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America’s new monopolies in Liberty from All Masters.
"Very few thinkers in recent years have done more to shift the debate in Washington than Barry Lynn."
—Franklin Foer
Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state, and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read “You ain’t the boss of me.”
Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century—in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few. The result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want.
The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon—designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions—is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
