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Mike Moschos's avatar

Well written paper!. In my opinion, building on your args, I think its important to note that a powerful but often overlooked historical example of such democratic economic governance already existed for much of US history, through intentional policy structures that essentially generated constant antitrust fields, even long before later federal antitrust enforcement came into being

From roughly the 1830s to some point after WW2, U.S. political and economic governance developed under a structurally decentralized regime combining localized capital formation, regionally chartered banks, and varied state-level industrial policies. While later, post war phase was more unified it remained economically and governmentally decentralized and pluralistic until centralizing actions taken during the advent of the so called Neoliberal Era; things National Bank Notes, state banking, localized industrial development, etc werent just things that existed alongside democratic economic governance, they enabled it and were parts of it, they were like its financial scaffolding.

The existence of thousands of individually chartered banks under both state and national regimes created a naturally fragmented credit system, preventing any single financial center from monopolizing capital flows while generating a geographic, sectoral, and societal diffusion of both access to capital and decision making related to its deployment. Alongside this, decentralized publicly accessible mass-member political parties served as democratic intermediaries, enabling economic and political voice at the local and regional levels, which constantly placed pressures against concentrations of private power. These structures intentionally generated economic redundancy by design: multiple overlapping banking, legal, and industrial frameworks meant that no single actor, public or private, could easily dominate capital allocation or productive industry.

Importantly, much of what you now describe as the need for federal antitrust law was also performed at lower levels of government through state corporate law restrictions, charter limitations, fair trade statutes, anti-monopoly, and more. The Old Republic saw these things it as the essential condition for democratic governance. Thus, the lowercase-d democratic aspects of "democratic economic governance" you seek were once generated not primarily by national administrators but by decentralized institutional design itself. As you ponder modern frameworks, one might ask whether proposals that rely heavily on federal technocratic administration can truly recreate the robust, self-sustaining democratization that broad regional capital autonomy once ensured. Your program may succeed technically, but without structural redundancy and participatory decentralization, theres a high risk that it simply creates a new set of centralized gatekeepers vulnerable to capture

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