This is really good interview and captures a lot of what I see as the fundamental problems in our economy and government. She understands the problem and appears to have the policy and political chops to fix it. There will be strong headwinds--as powerful interests are benefiting immensely under the current system--but she has a chance. And if she fails, we're basically resigning ourselves to a sort of corporatism/oligarchy for the forseeable future.
Foer: But markets right now are doing a good job of producing wealth. Yes?
Warren: Right.
Foer: In your description, that’s markets working.
Warren: The problem is that when the rules are not enforced, when the markets are not level playing fields, all that wealth is scraped in one direction. For example, leading up to the financial crash, there were a lot of mortgage brokers out there selling mortgages. Wow, did they get rich doing it. Families thought they were buying a product they could afford, whose payments they understood. Many of them lost everything. That’s a market that clearly was not working. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, after it passed, the first thing we did there at the bureau was to put new rules in place about mortgages. Not so that you could control the mortgage market, but so that the market would work.
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Foer: There are all these hints of Louis Brandeis in what you do. Brandeis had a vision of how the economy could be structured differently when the rules that he wanted were applied. He favored the small shopkeeper. In your vision, who gets favored? Are there forces in the market that you feel like are being unfairly shackled that you want to see unleashed?
Warren: Yes. Perfect. Competition. I love competition. I want to see every start-up business, everybody who’s got a good idea, have a chance to get in the market and try. This is what's so interesting to me. There are so many people right now who argue against these reforms and other reforms, who claim they are pro-business. They’re not. They’re pro-monopoly. They’re pro–concentration of power, which crushes competition.
This is where the political and the economic interact. Once a corporation climbs up the ladder so that it’s got hundreds of millions—no, so that it’s got billions of dollars in resources—today too many of them turn around and use those resources to influence government to cut off that ladder, so nobody else climbs it. To cut off that ladder so that the big guys don’t have to compete with the little guys anymore.
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When Big Pharma rolls into Washington and gets a law passed that says that the federal government cannot negotiate down the prices of drugs, then democracy is not working for families. When the big [coal] companies can get a new rule out of the EPA that will increase particulates in the air and trigger over 100,000 premature deaths, then democracy is not working for the American people. So you are exactly right. Everything I’m working on is about giving individuals the opportunity, the liberty to participate in this economy and in the governance of this country. I love this stuff. Isn’t this stuff fun?