Commentary Corporate power must be curbed to preserve free enterprise and stave off socialism, stated Milton Friedman and Jane Jacobs, two of the great public intellectuals of the 20th century. Fifty years before corporate leaders such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin told their companies to fight climate change, oversee election integrity, and perform other social and political functions, Friedman in a New York Times Magazine article characterized such corporate leaders as “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades.” The Big Tech titans have become especially powerful politically through their control of social media. This enables them, without meaningful accountability to shareholders, to direct their corporations’ resources to censor speech and assume other functions Friedman called “governmental” in nature, becoming “simultaneously legislator, executive, and jurist.” Jane Jacobs, in her 1994 book “Systems of Survival,” likewise warned …
Commentary Corporate power must be curbed to preserve free enterprise and stave off socialism, stated Milton Friedman and Jane Jacobs, two of the great public intellectuals of the 20th century. Fifty years before corporate leaders such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sergey Brin told their companies to fight climate change, oversee election integrity, and
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