Normally, I don’t like linking you to essays that encapsulate my own opinions. I feel if I can’t effectively argue them myself, I shouldn’t expect others to read a long and involved exposition of them.

But every now and then, I stumble across something that articulates my own opinions so completely (and addreses the objections others have to them so effectively) that I feel this natural reluctance should be overcome.

Please take the time to read this, I think it states my case on political economy more articulately than I can.

http://deoxy.org/korten_betrayal.htm

Some excerpts:

Ironically, Smith’s epic work The Wealth of Nations, which was first published in 1776, presents a radical condemnation of business monopolies sustained and protected by the state. Adam Smith’s ideal was a market comprised solely of small buyers and sellers. He showed how the workings of such a market would tend toward a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital, produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers, and result in an optimal outcome for society in terms of the allocation of its resources. He made clear, however, that this outcome can result only when no buyer or seller is sufficiently large to influence the market price—a point many who invoke his name prefer not to mention. Such a market implicitly assumes a significant degree of equality in the distribution of economic power—another widely neglected point.

The classical political economy of Adam Smith was a much broader, more humane subject than the economics that is taught in universities today. . . . For at least a century it has been virtually taboo to talk about economic power in the capitalist context; that was a communist (Marxist) idea. The concept of class was similarly banned from discussion.

Adam Smith was as acutely aware of issues of power and class as he was of the dynamics of competitive markets. However, the neoclassical economists and the neomarxist economists bifurcated his holistic perspective on the political economy, one taking those portions of the analysis that favored the owners of property and the other those that favored those who sell their labor. Thus, the neoclassical economists left out Smith’s considerations of the destructive role of power and class. And the neomarxists left out the beneficial functions of the market. Both advanced social experiments embodying a partial vision of society on a massive scale and with disastrous consequence.

When the necessary conditions are met the market is a powerful and efficient mechanism for allocating resources. What we now have is not a market economy. It is increasingly a command economy centrally planned and managed by the world’s largest corporations to maximize financial returns to top managers and the wealthiest shareholders at the expense of the rest of society. If the corporate libertarians were to bear serious allegiance to market principles and human rights, they would be calling for policies aimed at achieving the conditions in which markets function in a democratic fashion in the public interest. They would be calling for measures to end subsidies and preferential treatment for large corporations, to break up corporate monopolies, encourage the distribution of property ownership, internalize social and environmental costs, root capital in place, secure the rights of workers to the just fruits of their labor, and limit opportunities to obtain extravagant individual incomes far greater than their productive contribution.

Corporate libertarianism is not about creating the market conditions that market theory argues will result in optimizing the public interest. It is not about the public interest at all. It is about defending and institutionalizing the right of the economically powerful to do what best serves their immediate interests without public accountability for the consequences. It places power in institutions that are blind to issues of equity and environmental balance.