> America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses Increasingly? When wasn't that true?

> America is increasingly becoming a land of large companies controlling industries where the consumer almost always loses Increasingly? When wasn't that true? You have to go back to pre Civil War, where the economy was heavily geographically split due to movement/transport limitations, which mostly voids the discussion (it was very much a local and regional, agriculture-heavy economy, with limited manufacturing and a very limited consumer goods market as we know it today; not very comparable to anything that exists now). Once you get near to or beyond the Civil War and firmly into the industrial era, the combinations begin essentially immediately and they dominate their segments rapidly. Vanderbilt got so rich by aggressively creating monopolies in his day, in transport. It was far more brutal than anything you can imagine today, in all respects including the options/alternatives that consumers had. From US Steel in 1901 to the few giant railroads to Standard Oil to American Tobacco to the couple remaining giant auto companies (eg GM, Ford, Chrysler) that survived that industry's shakeout in the following decades. Further, you had a small group of industrialists and financiers that cross-controlled everything regardless (and they had few laws limiting their behavior), as with eg Rockefeller heavily dictating terms with the railroads to crush his competition. Leap forward in time: Sears, PAN-AM, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, US Steel, US Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Armour & Co., Kodak, Polaroid, a very small number of giant media companies like CBS, and so on. Yesterday was dominated entirely by massive corporations. It doesn't matter what decade you select. Whether it's 1910, 1950, 1980, or 2020. It wasn't better in the past. Markets always do this consolidating naturally. Your only option to prevent that is to use the government to prevent or interrupt it.