Liberty from All Masters

The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People

By: Barry C. Lynn

Narrated by: Chris Abernathy

Length: 10 hrs and 7 mins

Publisher's summary

One of America's preeminent thinkers provides the clearest statement yet on the nature and magnitude of the political and economic dangers posed by America's new monopolies.

Americans are obsessed with liberty, mad about liberty. On any day, we can tune into arguments about how much liberty we need to buy a gun or get an abortion, to marry who we want or adopt the gender we feel. We argue endlessly about liberty from regulation and observation by the state and proudly rebel against the tyranny of course syllabi and Pandora playlists. Redesign the penny today and the motto would read "You ain't the boss of me".

Yet Americans are only now awakening to what is perhaps the gravest domestic threat to our liberties in a century - in the form of an extreme and fast-growing concentration of economic power. Monopolists today control almost every corner of the American economy. The result is not only lower wages and higher prices, hence a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few; the result is also a stripping away of our liberty to work how and where we want, to launch and grow the businesses we want, to create the communities and families and lives we want.

The rise of online monopolists such as Google and Amazon - designed to gather our most intimate secrets and use them to manipulate our personal and group actions - is making the problem only far worse fast. Not only have these giant corporations captured the ability to manage how we share news and ideas with one another, they increasingly enjoy the power to shape how we move and play and speak and think.

©2020 Barry C. Lynn (P)2020 Random House Audio

Chicken Noodle Economics

This book is like listening to an old, drunk kook at a seedy bar, telling you "all about America". A bald guy, bad teeth, bad breath, poor fitness, in a piled Carhartt hoody, who lives in his elderly parent's basement - but has remarkably figured out the history of everything. Basically an American Karl Marx.

Lynn is worried about "monopoly" and names many. But he never makes the connection that Big Government makes Big Business. One before the other. Also, never makes the connection between inflationary monetary policy and anti-democratic concentration of power and influence. Also that America had losers, bankrupts, utopian jacobins, and crypto communist odd balls in 1776 - but just because they were around does not mean they created the nation, it would be like saying stoned hippie Americans in the 1960s did anything to help with Von Braun's lunar rocketry or help Watson-Crick discover DNA's structure. You could, generation-by-generation and Organization-by-Organization find truculent losers, complainers, and beggars of every kind - even the Romans had Gracchi losers, they dealt with them the Roman way - but their existence is just a human nature thing, they are not the backbone of human action.

Lynn has a decent reputation, but this is woke and amateur stuff. The whole book drips with woke alphabet soup, leftwing ideology, early COVID myths, and hipsterism. Hardly a scientific or hard-mathematical economic book. This is sad, flunky economics for angsty high-school kids. Nothing here resembles the respectable quality of Lynn's earlier books. This is hipsterism in the kook genre.

Interesting but too long

I found the book interesting and somewhat enlightening. The book helps to explain the income gap that has happen during the last 30 years as result of redefining anti trust laws to encourage efficient which had a negative affect on competitiveness.Although the author spent a little to much time on his soapbox repeating his thoughts especially towards the end of the book