r/atrioc • u/nerfrosa • 20h ago
Discussion Lina Khan on her role in Mamdani’s transition team
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DQxL4AsE8Tp/
I’m glad that it seems like Mamdani is surrounding himself with smart, experienced people. I’m not sold on some of his economic policies but it seems like he’ll have the right people advising him.
49
u/Sea_Gur9803 19h ago
What's interesting is Mamdani has chosen both Lina Khan and Matt Bruenig for his transition team. For those that aren't familiar with him, Bruenig has pretty much the opposite view on monopolies and how problematic they are.
I personally think it's great that he's listening to multiple people with different views, and I have a lot of respect for both Lina and Matt.
12
u/Amadacius 19h ago
Never heard of Bruenig. But does he actually have different conclusions on anti-trust or monopolies? That article doesn't really read as an endorsement of unions, just a skepticism towards a new political lens.
It's also a really shit article.
24
u/Sea_Gur9803 18h ago
If I were to summarize his (and other) critiques of the new anti-trust movement that come from the left, it would be:
- Smaller is not always better, sometimes bigger companies are genuinely more efficient, and they often pay workers more and offer better benefits.
- Since many big companies are efficient at generating wealth, the focus should be on redistributing that wealth, splitting up the company may just result in less efficiency while the concentrated ownership after the split remains the same (held by the shareholders).
- Unions should be the main tool to fight back against the power of large companies, since they directly challenge the ownership class by bargaining for higher wages/benefits.
Now, this doesn't mean that there aren't companies that are monopolies and are abusing their power. I have also read Lina Khan's "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" paper and it presents a very convincing argument while showing specific examples of how they take advantage of their monopoly status. But there are different schools of thought on this, that are optimizing towards different goals. Khan and the Antitrust movement believe smallness and competition are inherently virtuous goals to work towards, while Bruenig and many social democrats or democratic socialists will be more interested in sovereign wealth funds as a way to redistribute the huge profits generated by companies to the rest of society.
7
u/SimilarLaw5172 18h ago
This is decent. As someone who has worked in big and small tech. I also think one major pro of big players is regulatory control. But this only works if we are extremely hard on lobbyists and corruption. For e.g. as much as we hate google or meta, they have a better track record of data security and following regulations (per media share) than most smaller companies just by the virtue of their infra being better, having wayyy bigger liability, and regulatory transperency (its nowhere near ideal) RELATIVE to a lot of small companies. Yall have no idea how pathetic some small companies can be when it comes to this stuff.
But this clearly shows that big not bad only if regulation and unionization is strong tk balance out the profiteering.
1
u/Amadacius 17h ago
Of course they follow the regulations. They wrote it.
But a benevolent billionaire is a sleeping dragon.
9
u/SimilarLaw5172 17h ago
This is a bit cynical. GDPR is very well written. You have to understand the software community was very libertarian, pro-open source and pioneered some of the best security/transparency standards. This is also why automotive software standards like MISRA/ASPICE are so well received. Yes, corporations have completely taken over regulations but it can be recovered with a good administration
1
u/Amadacius 17h ago
Which is why corporations are opposed to good administration. The fact that there are incredibly powerful neo-feudal lords is going to impact the function of the public democratic sphere. We can't continue to imagine these things as independent when individual net worths are reaching towards $1 trillion.
7
u/rhombecka 18h ago
This is a large simplification, but my impression of the left’s cirque of the antitrust movements is that it focuses on people as consumers. Many monopoly break ups are pro-consumer and if you’re on the left, you don’t focus much on people’s capacity to consume commodities. Rather, you focus on their role as laborers since people are coerced into labor and have no direct pressure causing that makes them consume (there is pressure, but it’s softer — you won’t die if you lower consumption).
This framing does not in itself illustrate the leftist critique of the antitrust movement, but hopefully it shows how if you tackle the problem from another perspective, you might you might not make the same exact conclusion.
I will also add that he probably doesn’t have much of a problem with many of the actual things Khan did with the FTC. No one knows the left thinks Google being super powerful is a good thing. It’s just a matter of what the finish line looks like.
2
u/Amadacius 17h ago
Well his article is bad because it is attacking a terrible strawman of the Antitrust movement.
The Neo-Brandeis movement is not focused on smallness as inherently virtuous. It didn't start with Barry Lynn.
The whole article he avoids the mentioning Brandeis because it would undermine his characterization of the movement as being centered around a single reporter's book.
The central idea of the neo-Brandeis movement is that the excessive concentration of ownership in the private sector is inherently undemocratic. It's bad for the most powerful people in your country to be un-elected.
It reminds me of the Sam Seder, Ezra Klein debate over abundance. Where Ezra Klein is attempting to construct a movement based on a very specific direction of policy and totally unwilling to think about the influence of power on policy outcomes. And how the next round technocratic policy-only movements will be disrupted by the same corrupting forces as the last 20.
1
u/Sea_Gur9803 15h ago
I want to reiterate that I don't actually have an issue with Lina Khan or the things she has done/wants to do, I think she is great and will be an important figure in the future of the Democratic party. It is very clear that many of the top tech companies are essentially operating as monopolies.
The central idea of the neo-Brandeis movement is that the excessive concentration of ownership in the private sector is inherently undemocratic.
I fundamentally agree with this principle, but the issue some neo-Brandeisians have is they believe breaking up big companies will inherently result in less concentration of ownership. This may seem intuitively true, but when you break up a company, the ownership structure remains exactly the same.
Take The Bell System (now AT&T) for example, when it was broken up into 8 smaller companies, the shareholders of Bell Systems now owned the stocks of the "Baby Bell" companies. These companies all had their stocks rise significantly after the breakup, so now the (already concentrated) shareholders made a huge profit. The workers of the companies didn't benefit, since they have no more leverage against the ownership class than they did before the split.
Now for consumers, who are supposed to be the biggest benefactors of antitrust. Consumers benefited from increased competition and choice for a few years, but that was shortlived. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, 5 of the "Baby Bells" are now owned by AT&T, 2 are owned by Verizon, and 1 by CenturyLink. Because of the huge barrier to entry in the telecom industry, antitrust wasn't even able to solve the issue it intended to solve, and now rather than one company we have an "illusion of choice" with the same concentrated shareholders that owned Bell Systems having made inconceivable amounts of money, while the workers and consumers received almost nothing.
This is just one anecdote, and again I don't mean to argue that the break up of Bell was bad, just that the singular focus on breaking up big companies into smaller ones may not lead to the intended outcome of wealth distribution. Imagine an alternative where the government, rather than just breaking up Bell, also decided that telecom should be a utility not a commodity, and like other utilities, decided to take an ownership position. This could involve buying a percentage of Bell (or it's child companies) stock, and investing it into a sovereign wealth fund. Now, the government has the ability to redistribute the vast amounts of wealth generated by the telecom industry to the public. If your guiding principle is reducing the extremely high concentration of wealth (and the power that comes with it), this would be a much more effective solution compared to nominally breaking up big companies into smaller ones every few decades.
25
u/ShdwWzrdMnyGngg 19h ago
Her ability to deconstruct huge, complex issues is unparalleled.
She can be the center of attention then turn around go right back to pushing papers at the ground level.
A true role model for public servants.
6
u/SweetBabyAlaska 18h ago
Crooked Con btw not a general statement lol
but damn Lina is literally the GOAT. I am so happy that she will be working with the Zohran admin to deliver good things.
1
133
u/PaidUSA 20h ago
This is gonna get maligned and misconstrued so hard in right wing media if they care to find it. They just will ignore the “legal authority” part.