Luigi Zingales invites guest contributors to the Washington Post’s op-ed pages to boycott the opinion section in response to the recent decision by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, to restrict certain ideas from the publication.
“Democracy dies in darkness” is the famous motto of the Washington Post, adopted after President Donald Trump won the 2016 election. Ironically, the recent decision of Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, to mandate that its opinion pages are filled “every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” contributes to that darkness.
It is always sad when free debate is restricted for ideological reasons. It is even sadder when the stated goals may hide more sinister ones. The terms “personal liberties and free markets” in the mouth of a billionaire are often code words for “unbound by the law” and “free to abuse monopoly power.” Does Bezos mean that any op-ed advocating for any form of regulation or antitrust enforcement will be banned? As philosopher Isaiah Berlin stated, “freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”
Therefore, I invite all guest opinion writers to withhold their pitches and boycott the Washington Post op-ed page. It is no longer an arena where debate among the best ideas helps the truth emerge. It is the propaganda instrument of a billionaire. Readers have already started to teach Bezos a lesson in free markets: 75,000 have canceled their digital subscriptions. It is time for opinion writers to do the same. Advertisers will follow suit.
Of course, silence is no better, so I encourage writers to place their ideas elsewhere. ProMarket will be happy to do its part. In 1919, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously argued that the “ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Competition in the marketplace of ideas is essential not just for democracy (and that would be enough) but also for a well-functioning capitalist system. As a recent paper shows, when ideas are not free to compete, even the stock market is impacted negatively.
Unfortunately, this circulation of ideas is becoming increasingly restricted in the United States. Two oligarchs control most of the social media. A few others control most of the major newspapers, from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal, from the Los Angeles Times to the Minnesota Star-Tribune. Even when this concentration of power does not lead to explicit censorship, it provokes a great deal of voluntary self-censorship. Who is the journalist willing to criticize an oligarch when a few of them control all their future career options? These concerns led the Stigler Center to dedicate its upcoming annual conference to “Economic Concentration and the Marketplace of Ideas.” You can follow it online on April 10 and 11. Unfortunately, there is no more opportune time to have this discussion.
In the meantime, it is important to prepare for that discussion with an online forum on the meaning of free markets. All too often, people use “free market” to mean the absence of rules, the law of the jungle. To produce their magic, however, markets need rules: not so intense to suffocate them, but rules to prevent abuses, opportunism, and excessive concentration. I invite everybody to contribute, including Jeff Bezos, because, at the University of Chicago, we believe in free debate.
Submissions to the online forum on the meaning of free markets can be sent to promarket@chicagobooth.edu.
Author disclosure: Luigi Zingales is faculty director of the Stigler Center and a member of ProMarket’s editorial board. His disclosure form can be found here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
