Socialists Will Never Understand Elizabeth Warren (I’d have chosen a different title)

The Democratic candidate is part of a long intellectual tradition that’s gone forgotten in the West: pro-market leftism.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s politics seem like a tangle of contradictions. She wants free markets, but also wants to tax billionaires’ capital. Her enemies on the right claim that she is a socialist, but Warren describes herself as “capitalist to my bones.”

Warren’s politics are so confusing because we have forgotten that a pro-capitalist left is even possible. For a long time, political debate in the United States has been a fight between conservatives and libertarians on the right, who favored the market, and socialists and liberals on the left, who favored the government.

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Other Writing:

Chapter in an Edited Volume

“Great Britain: Falling Through the Holes in the Network Concept,” in Local Production Systems in Europe: Rise or Demise? – with Colin Crouch – ed. Colin Crouch et al.

British economic development has long exhibited strong regional patterns and contrasts. The UK shares with France a characteristic not possessed by Germany or Italy: the contemporary weakness of its major regional centres, so that the capital cities (London and Paris) and the regions surrounding them (the so-called Home Counties in south-east England and the Ile ...
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Essay

Choke Points – with Abraham Newman

Since the end of the Cold War, businesses have built an awe-inspiring global infrastructure. Digital pipelines move vast amounts of capital and data around the world, and supply chains crisscross international boundaries in a spider web of commerce. An intricate system of networks keeps the global economy running smoothly, but it’s easy to take for ...
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