Jonathan Tepper

“If we look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, most workers are not asking to find their true calling at their jobs, as Weber suggested, but are simply asking to get paid a living wage and have certainty they'll have a job next week.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition

“All around the world, people have an overwhelming sense that something is broken. This is leading to record levels of populism in the United States and Europe, resurgent intolerance, and a desire to upend the existing order. The left and right cannot agree on what is wrong, but they both know that something is rotten. Capitalism has been the greatest system in history to lift people out of poverty and create wealth, but the “capitalism” we see today in the United States is a far cry from competitive markets. What we have today is a grotesque, deformed version of capitalism. Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz have referred to it as “ersatz capitalism,” where the distorted representation we see is as far away from the real thing as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean are from real pirates. If what we have is a fake version of capitalism, what does the real thing look like? What should we have? According to the dictionary, the idealized state of capitalism is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions.”
― Jonathan Tepper, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition