This is the unfortunate logical conclusion to industries becoming capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. When most industries were labor intensive it m

This is the unfortunate logical conclusion to industries becoming capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive. When most industries were labor intensive it made little sense to aggregate businesses. Your costs are defined by the price of labor; there's little to save by grouping up. It may even have been a negative, because of the unwieldiness of large businesses. Capital-intensive businesses love to aggregate because they can make more efficient use of the capital investment. You can buy one set of machines and do 100% utilization, rather than have two companies with two sets of machines each at 50% utilization. That's a gross oversimplification, but hopefully the point is clear. You can also see this in older companies. It's not an accident that the Dutch East India company was massive. The sailors cost nothing relative to the price of the ship and the goods it carries. And yes, competition does go down because nobody wants to get into a capital-intensive industry where the only way to be competitive is to scale up to the size of the existing competitor. It's a zero sum game, and you're starting out way behind. I don't know what to do about that, but I do think this aggregation is making our supply chains brittle in exchange for cheaper goods.