The impact of little transparency

Back in the early 1900's, we had a situation where a small number of very wealthy industrialists controlled a large portion of the economy. As I've said before, I'm a staunch capitalist but also believe in fair play. Probably beginning with books like Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", we began to see the advent of labor unions and a bigger voice for employees. Since then, we've generally had a reasonable give and take between pure capitalism and the rights of the worker and common man.

Unfortunately - and oddly enough from self-described liberals - we're getting back to similar conditions. The difference may well be the fair treatment of the consumer rather than the worker. With Google, Facebook, etc. providing enormous lobbying dollars, they essentially have a monopoly and almost no limits on data collection. I said this in a previous post but I've unplugged my Alexa...

http://www.aei.org/publication/graphic-of-the-day-capitalism-vs-crony-capitalism/