Wealth & Money Quote by David Korten

Korten’s move here is to take capitalism at its own word, then quietly point out how rarely that word matches the world. By calling “many small buyers and sellers” the “first principle,” he’s invoking the fairy-tale version of markets: decentralized, competitive, hard for any one actor to rig. The loaded turn is “which implies a substantial degree of equity.” In standard econ, lots of small players implies efficiency, not fairness. Korten swaps in equity as the real stakes, reframing market structure as a moral architecture: if power is dispersed, bargaining is real; if it concentrates, “choice” becomes theater.

The second principle - that costs are “internalized” in price - targets the most common way modern capitalism cheats its own scorekeeping. Pollution, health harms, labor precarity, community dislocation: these are costs that routinely fall outside the price tag, paid in asthma inhalers, unpaid caregiving, and degraded public infrastructure. Korten’s subtext is that today’s dominant firms don’t just win by being better; they win by exporting costs to everyone else while calling it “efficiency.”

Context matters: Korten writes from the activist critique of corporate globalization, where the “market economy” is often a brand name slapped on systems that are closer to managed oligopoly. The intent isn’t to romanticize markets; it’s to set criteria that, if taken seriously, indict the status quo. He’s offering a kind of rhetorical audit: if you want the legitimacy of markets, you don’t get to keep the concentration and the externalities.