3 ms·

Can you name an example of a monopoly that has developed in the last 50 years that didn’t occur because of crony capitalism?

• nautilius 4y ago
  lock-the-spock explicitly writes about reality, and within the real system we have, monopolies develop.
  • nickff 4y ago
    The problem is that it’s difficult to distinguish whether the government caused the oligopoly, or is mitigating its (often deleterious) impacts.
• simonh 4y ago
  It very much depends what we agree monopoly means. Did Microsoft Windows have a monopoly on consumer desktop operating systems? Arguably Apple only survived because Microsoft bailed them out in 1997 to avoid being accused of having a monopoly. Does Google have a monopoly on search? Tech naturally tends towards monopolies because almost everyone benefits from using the same tech as everyone else they know. The same messaging system, the same operating system running the same applications that use the same file formats. As for crony capitalism as a source of monopolies, sure of course that can happen, but if we look away from capitalism basically the only other alternative anyone has come up with is pure unadulterated cronyism. Communism, socialism, they all end up being pure cronyist monopoly systems. At least with capitalism you have an outside chance of getting away from that.
• baq 4y ago
  > 50 years The three main U.S. antitrust statutes are the Sherman Act of 1890, the Clayton Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914. so yeah, you won't find many, because the regulation works.