RECOMMENDED READING
At Law and Liberty, I took part in a symposium debating the libertarian scholar Richard Epstein’s comparison of labor unions to predatory monopolies, which he described as the “classical liberal” view. In my contribution, I pointed out that both Adam Smith and J.S. Mill, who were classical liberals by any definition, rejected the idea that wages were fixed by automatic market forces instead of what Smith called “higgling” or negotiation, and both Smith and Mill emphasized the inequality of bargaining power among employers and workers.
Recommended Reading
Antitrust or Countervailing Power?
A strange development of recent years has been the revival on parts of the left and the right of the long-dormant ideology of antimonopolism, once associated with agrarian populists like William Jennings Bryan and progressives like Louis Brandeis.
How Should We Handle Monopolies?
A House of Representatives sub-committee report on large technology platforms has determined that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are abusive monopolies. Matt Stoller has summarized the report’s recommended course of Read more…
America Needs a Conservative Labor Movement
American Compass’s Oren Cass argues that a strong, reformed labor movement has unique potential to advance conservative priorities.
