Can we save American capitalism?

[MachineGhost]

As a professor at the free-market-oriented University of Chicago, Luigi Zingales is hardly the person you’d expect to be calling for a renewed populism. But as a native Italian, Zingales has a particular sensitivity to public and private corruption. His thesis is that most of our problems stem from special interests using government policies and regulation to create a kind of crony capitalism.

“Lack of competition and the distortions created by government subsidies are the primary causes of all the problems we face in the economy today, including the declining real incomes of middle-class America,”? Zingales writes in the introduction to“A Capitalism for the People.”?

In this accessible and powerfully argued book, Zingales calls for a capitalism that is not pro-business but pro-market, that celebrates meritocracy but not inherited privilege, that emphasizes the accountability of economic actors as much as their freedom and discretion. The essential element of capitalism, he argues, is full and open competition, and it is only when competition is absent that you get the kind of inequality, instability and class rigidity that Americans have recently experienced.

Zingales’s diagnosis and his prescriptions — education reform, bankruptcy reform, income-based student loan repayments, tougher consumer protection and antitrust enforcement, limits on corporate lobbying and campaign contributions, stronger investor control of corporate governance and executive compensation, wider whistleblower protections and class-action remedies — are strikingly similar to those offered by Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning Columbia University economist who comes from the other end of the ideological spectrum.

http://tinyurl.com/c5xwfst

[Jan Van]

Will be tough, as long as both dems and gop are bought and paid for. Don't see that change anytime soon, not until we get some kind of public campaign funding.
Or unless we all start voting for a third party...