I like that this writer seems to have some awareness of the utter impotence of antitrust enforcement in the US. But in his Wired article, Matt Stoller writes:

I like that this writer seems to have some awareness of the utter impotence of antitrust enforcement in the US. But in his Wired article, Matt Stoller writes: > The coronavirus relief bill, however, is an explicit takeover of Main Street-level activity by the state. It’s hard to wrap your mind around the ideological change that has taken place. Before this disease, Democrats were deeply skeptical of power grabs by the Trump administration. Today, Democrats are angry the President isn’t more aggressively commandeering private corporations and forcing them to make medical supplies. Think about what it means in a capitalist society for the government to take over the means of production. Now think about what it means for Democrats to demand that Trump seize more executive authority. Both of those things just happened. This is so wildly ignorant of socialism and the law at hand that I wonder if American journalists should forever be banned from writing about the subject. The law itself includes something like $500 billion in forgivable business loans, some of which is earmarked for specific industries. The government isn't taking over anything — it's just handing mountains of cash to corporations which were too irresponsible to plan for a rainy day. It doesn't give the government direct control over these corporations in the way taking an ownership stake would. We're not living in a command economy any more than we were in 2008. It's just the government socializing the losses of irresponsible corporations in the wake of gross mismanagement of the crisis by the Trump administration. Incompetence is expensive.