Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society

We live in an era of "stagnequality"—a toxic brew of sluggish economic growth and widening inequality that has fractured the liberal order and fueled populist rage,. In Radical Markets, Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl argue that our standard political and economic prescriptions are utterly exhausted,. Their provocative diagnosis is that we do not suffer from too much capitalism, but rather from too little. By clinging to antiquated notions of private property and rigid democratic rules, we have allowed stealth monopolies to choke our society,.

To uproot these entrenched powers, the authors propose pushing free-market principles to their absolute extremes,. Because traditional private property inherently acts as a monopoly, they introduce a "Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax" (COST),. Under this system, owners self-declare an asset's value, pay a corresponding tax, and must surrender the asset to anyone meeting that price—transforming stagnant ownership into a fluid, efficient market of "uses",. Similar anti-monopoly logic is deployed to break the cartel-like grip of massive institutional investors on corporate America. Furthermore, the authors challenge the "technofeudalism" of Silicon Valley, demanding that the data users passively generate be treated and compensated as legitimate labor,.

This radical imagination seamlessly extends to our civic life. To cure democratic systems where indifferent majorities routinely tyrannize passionate minorities, they introduce "Quadratic Voting",. Citizens would spend accrued "voice credits" to buy votes at a quadratically rising cost, dynamically and accurately weighing the intensity of voters' desires,. Finally, they envision a decentralized visa system where ordinary citizens personally sponsor migrant workers, ensuring the profound wealth of global labor mobility is shared directly by the working class rather than hoarded by corporate elites,.

Ultimately, Radical Markets treats the market not as an immutable natural law, but as a programmable computer for human cooperation,. It provides a daring, original blueprint to revive prosperity and forge a truly just society,.