I think it's a little bit better than that. There was a theory in operation: regulation which prevents sprawling monopolies will produce good results for societ

I think it's a little bit better than that. There was a theory in operation: regulation which prevents sprawling monopolies will produce good results for society. Of course, if you shook the historical dice differently, there would be different results. From that point of view it's all contingent, and you can't re-run the historical experiment, and so whatever conclusions you draw must be a Just So story. But, that theory was in operation. There were regulations which prevented sprawling monopolies, and large (but not sprawling monopolistic) companies did produce a lot of good things for society. No one knew what they would be ahead of time - that's all contingent, after all - but regulators regulated with the expectation that their regulations would produce good effects. Now we've de-regulated, and the people doing the de-regulation theorize that (predictably) sprawling monopolistic companies will produce more good for society than large (but not sprawling monopolistic) regulated companies did. So... Did / do they? It's fair enough to argue either way. It's fair enough to argue about which regulations are effective and which are not. It's not fair enough to throw up our hands and say "we can't actually know what's going to happen, so there's no point discussing it." Because there are theories of economics and governance in play, and they matter, and they need to be appraised.