Denise Hearn: The Myth of Capitalism

Every year, Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn releases a list of the best books he read that year. Past lists have included books that shaped the Strong Towns conversation in profound ways: Chris Arnade’s Dignity (2019), Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind (2017), Cognitive Architecture, by Ann Sussmann and Justin Hollander (2017), and Tomas Sedlacek’s Economics of Good and Evil (2016), to name just a few.

Spoiler alert: 2020’s list will include The Myth of Capitalism, coauthored by Denise Hearn, this week’s guest on The Strong Towns Podcast. Hearn is a Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and an advisor to organizations, asset managers, and companies who want to use their resources to support a more equitable future.

In the introduction to The Myth of Capitalism, Hearn and her coauthor, Jonathan Tepper, write that capitalism has been “the greatest system in history to lift people out of poverty and create wealth.” Yet the “capitalism” we see in the U.S. today is so misshapen it hardly qualifies. “The battle for competition is being lost. Industries are becoming highly concentrated in the hands of very few players, with little real competition.” Capitalism without competition, they say, is not capitalism.

If you believe in competitive markets, you should be very concerned. If you believe in fair play and hate cronyism, you should be worried. With fake capitalism CEOs cozy up to regulators to get the kind of rules they want and donate to get the laws they desire. Larger companies get larger, while the small disappear, and the consumer and worker are left with no choice.

In this episode, Marohn and Hearn discuss why reduced competition—in the form of monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies—hurts us not only as consumers and workers but as citizens and community members. They talk about the collusion (both direct and tacit) that consolidates wealth and power into fewer hands. And they discuss what our economic systems must learn from natural systems, including the role of competition and the importance of “habitat maintenance.” (Fans of Jane Jacobs' The Nature of Economies will love this part.)

Ending on a hopeful note, Marohn and Hearn also discuss the convergence, across industries, of new conversations about how to build stronger towns and stronger economies from the bottom-up.

• The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition, by Jonathan Tepper with Denise Hearn

• Denise Hearn (Twitter)

• Denise Hearn (Website)

• “My Journey from Free Market Ideologue to Strong Towns Advocate,” by Charles Marohn

• The Ultimate Strong Towns Reading List