The Case for Markets Without Masters

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The Case for Markets Without Masters

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Let’s be honest about what failed in the 20th century.

Communism – the state owning the means of production – failed not because the intention was wrong but because it concentrated too much power in too few hands. When a government controls your food, your job, your housing, and your information simultaneously, it doesn’t need to be malicious to become tyrannical. The absence of competition and the absence of accountability produce the same result whether the entity in power calls itself a corporation or a political party: the people at the top stop serving the people at the bottom.

This matters because any proposal to change the current order will immediately be labeled communist by those who benefit from the current order. So let’s name the principle clearly: a government with too much power is exactly as dangerous as an oligarchy with too much power. Both remove accountability. Both extract value from the many to benefit the few. The costume differs; the architecture is the same.

What markets actually do well

Markets, when genuinely competitive, do something remarkable: they aggregate the preferences of millions of individuals into prices that coordinate complex activity without requiring anyone to be in charge. No central planner could replicate what a functioning market does with supply, demand, and price signals. This is real, it works, and it should be preserved.

What doesn’t work is the fiction that today’s global markets are competitive. When a small number of investment firms collectively hold controlling stakes in the majority of major companies across the same industries, the competition between those companies is largely theater. Prices are set to maximize the return to those same firms regardless of which brand wins on any given shelf.

The third path

The proposal here is not to abolish markets. It is to change who owns them.

A fund owned equally by every human being on earth is not a government. It has no army, no tax authority, and no power to imprison. It is a shareholder — the world’s largest one — that competes in the same markets as everyone else, subject to the same laws and the same consumer choices. The difference is that its profits don’t flow to a penthouse in three cities. They flow to a grandmother in Lagos, a farmer in Vietnam, a teacher in Bolivia, and a software developer in Oslo, in equal measure.

Markets remain. Competition remains. Innovation remains. The only thing that changes is where the surplus goes — and who gets to decide what to do with it. That decision, under this model, belongs to everyone.