Louis Brandeis once said, "we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both." It's part of a long American tradition that abhors the gathering of power into just a few hands. 1/
But there's a countertradition in American politics: the belief in the unchecked power of plutocrats and robber-barons, who amass great fortunes, convert them into political power, and use that power to unaccountably structure the lives of millions of working people. 2/
Some Americans call this "liberty."
The tension between aristocratic aspirations and democratic limits has been part of America since the earliest days. 3/
I'm Kickstarting a DRM-free audiobook of Chokepoint Capitalism, the book @rgibli and I wrote about how tech- and entertainment monopolies rip off artists, and how to unrig those terrible labor markets:
Chances are you buy your audiobooks on @audible_com, Amazon's monopoly, with a 90+% share in many genres. But my books aren't there. I explain why I forego most of the market in a chapter in "Chokepoint Capitalism," my forthcoming book, co-authored with @rgibli. 1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Audible is a classic "chokepoint capitalism" story. 2/
It's a company that corralled an audience in a walled garden, and uses that control to demand greater and greater concessions from the creators who want to reach them, eventually abandoning all pretense of fairness and literally stealing from creators. 3/
I'm saying that if you cheered Bukele when he said he'd ram Bitcoin down Salvadorans' throats while boasting of being a "dictator," then you cheered for someone who is, in fact, a dictator, and you do not believe in freedom, you believe in Bitcoin.
Moreover, this is of a piece with the long, long "libertarian" tradition of cheering on murdering dictators whose program of "economic liberty" requires jailing and killing their enemies (c.f. Friedman and Hayek's direct complicity in Pinochet's tens of thousands of murders).
There's a reason that Thiel says "democracy is incompatible with freedom."
Youth Hostel “Ockenburgh” (1971-74) in Den Haag, the Netherlands, by Frank van Klingeren. Demounted in 2010 and currently being reassembled at a different location in town. germanpostwarmodern.tumblr.com/post/694715519…