Small and Monopoly Property

We saw Easy Rawlins get screwed out of locally-owned Freedom Plaza in Black Betty. We saw in Chinatown a syndicate of wealthy private interests buy farmlands that they could make a fortune turning into suburbs because of publicly-funded water projects (the bond issue).   Marx is one of our Noir Philosophers for saying why this concentrated power is a problem--for workers and for society.  Below I've posted the 5-point slide plus a second slide.  Below the slides, I've pasted in a story about a Manhattan hardware store that is closing.

In lecture, I suggested a solution that the course materials offer is small property plus democratic control over key aspects of the economy.  This latter issue is very much at issue in the 2020 election.  The "noir" take is that it's completely unrealistic--the strong always rule the weak, who conform to them.  So the critique of monopoly capitalism would need also to deal with those social and psychological issues.

And Happy Thanksgiving!

"The Life and Death of the Local Hardware Store"

Note that the author, a professor at Columbia Law School who writes about tech and internet law, is frustrated with the psychology of people who would rather shop on Amazon than in a hardware store even though Amazon means they often buy the wrong stuff.  Have we learned things in this course that might help explain this mystery?