The author is right — the market raises prices to what people are willing to pay. And in so many markets, ownership is concentrated, and so one ends up with monopoly-like pricing.

The solution though is not to try to control prices or distribution. The Soviets tried that. It was a failure.

The root problem is the division between “owners” and “consumers” — like the Marxist concept of worker and landlord. This two-tier concept is obsolete: workers can be landlords, and landlords can be workers. And in today’s economy, flexibility plays an important role, as does innovation and information/knowledge. These need to be factored in. Landlords — corporate owners — are often overturned today through innovation: twenty years go by and a-lot can change.

I believe that what is really broken about the US system is corporate law. The concept of shareholder versus worker is like the two-tier model of Marxism. It is what locks us into the unfairness that the author describes. What if workers were also corporate owners? There are details to be worked out in that, but that is the basic ingredient. And it exists today: coops.

One thing I don’t want is for the “government” to try to create an economic system. It would end up being like the Soviet system.

But corporate law — the concept of “corporation” as currently defined in US law and the laws of most nations — is a root cause of today’s inequities.