Private Power and Democracy's Decline

Why unfettered free-market capitalism endangers democracy—and what to do about it.

In Private Power and Democracy’s Decline, Mordecai Kurz explores the relationship between free-market capitalism and democracy. He shows that technology has made capitalism different from what was envisioned in the Age of Enlightenment. Technology creates centers of market power and monopoly concentration that result in a society in which some people are enriched immensely while many workers’ livelihoods are often destroyed. Contrary to conventional thinking, technological competition does not remove market power, which becomes a permanent fixture of free-market capitalism. Such private power creates political inequality and generates forces that cause democracy’s decline and possible destruction.

Applying these ideas to the US, Kurz shows that today’s problems begin in the 1980s with the policy of unregulated free-market capitalism. Coupled with the information technology revolution, this created a techno-winner-takes-all economy—leading to a second Gilded Age of unsustainable inequality and extreme political polarization. In the last 50 years, the economy “boomed” for some while leaving the majority of America’s workers behind.

Kurz concludes that only regulated capitalism can support democracy so that the benefits of technology are more equally shared and no person’s livelihood is destroyed to enable others to be enriched. To save democracy, he proposes a “restoration-of-livelihood” policy, offering firms managerial flexibility to maintain rising productivity while ensuring that technology does not destroy the livelihood of others.