venus.

a moment of clarity.

words.

"Since the early 1980s, executives and financiers have consolidated control over dozens of industries across the U.S. economy. From cable companies and hospitals to airlines, grocery stores and meatpackers, where once many small and mid-size businesses competed, today we see a few giants dominate. They use their power to raise prices, drive down wages and foreclose opportunity. Wealth is transferred from consumers, workers and entrepreneurs to affluent executives and shareholders.

The ongoing debate in America over economic inequality — as seen, for instance, in the Occupy movement and the success of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — is a vital one. But it is incomplete. The challenge is not limited to the decline of organized labor, tax cuts for the well-off and the increased power of Wall Street. The lack of competition in many sectors of the U.S. economy is also a powerful driver of economic disparity.

...Many factors drive the inequality of wealth and income in America, but decreased competition matters because the concentration of economic power also concentrates political power, which in turn positions dominant companies to reshape economic policies in ways that further favor them. Many of the important policy decisions that have contributed to inequality in recent decades — including financial deregulation and lower corporate taxes — reflect the lobbying of oligopolistic corporations.

...We can restore a more fair and competitive economy. To do so, we must realize, first, that intense concentration across our markets contributes to inequality. Second, we must recognize that we have the right to use laws to neutralize the power of these corporate giants. Americans in the Gilded Age freed themselves from the clutches of Standard Oil and the railroads because they knew that markets and economic outcomes were theirs to shape. Today, by contrast, we frequently surrender this power by assuming that inequality is a result of impersonal forces — technology, globalization — to be tracked and studied by technocrats, rather than a condition we can change through popular will and political action.

...the relationship between uncompetitive markets and inequality is largely ignored. Let’s not forget that earlier generations overcame the concentrated wealth and power of the Gilded Age by restoring competitive markets, a pillar of economic and political democracy. We can do it again."

THE WASHINGTON POST: How America became uncompetitive and unequal