Common Ownership And The New Antitrust Movement
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In this piece, I argue that recent critics of common ownership (which refers to the way in which public companies are all owned by the same set of diversified shareholders) confront the new antitrust movement with a serious problem:
If the common ownership critics are right about the source of our economy’s rot, then antitrust remedies aimed at increasing the number of firms in a given market will be inadequate. After all, multiplying the number of firms operating in a particular sector will do nothing about the fact that those larger number of firms will still be jointly owned by the same people who owned the smaller number of firms that preceded them.
I go on to explain the way in which the common ownership debate feeds into a similar debate about simulated competition under market socialism.