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IMHO, it’s the government which should understand how capitalism works and to not try interfere with the market …

AtlasBarfed 2y ago
You notice how the right (or really any politician or think tank blabber) doesn't trump the "free market" anymore? It used to be every other minute on CNN in the 1990s and 2000s. Why is that? Well, pretty simple, the corporate powers have all largely settled into cartel, duopoly, or outright monopoly alignments within their markets. Market competition is pretty weak in the US, and it is hurting our competitiveness worldwide. The reality is that the nth-iterative stability of "free markets" in the real world with barriers to entry and even more important, regulatory capture, is cartel in best case. A lot of the centralization of wealth in the US is through the large cartel megacorporations. Using those, the "elite" can extract wealth and wage war on labor costs, which goddamn they LOVE to do, more than shirk taxes. Oh, and the megacorporations also enable massive tax avoidance (loans on existing unrealized stock value as a great example). So what the government SHOULD be doing is antitrust right and left, and breaking up all these monopolies and cartels. It would inject a huge amount of labor demand (at good job wages), a huge amount of anti-inflationary competition, and produce massive amounts of innovation, since you'd have a dozen companies trying different products and production methods in markets, as opposed to ... two.
- gregw2 2y ago
  I am sympathetic to your argument. I just would like to point out the irony that you want to break up companies to improve our global competitiveness. I seem to recall hearing in the late 90s and early 2000s a theme that the US really needed to let these companies combine so we could have large national players who would have the scale to compete globally with other nations' mega-corps. (Not so much in terms of FAANG tech perhaps, but certainly in banking and many other sectors.) I'm not sure if there is some definitive research on what corporate size truly helps global competitiveness (but I'd expect that, as you say, smaller competitors in larger numbers tend to be more competitive.) But even in China car industry as transitioning today, the natural evolution of such a system is towards a fewer larger competitors. Kind of related to the iron law of oligarchy perhaps, this phenomena? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

You notice how the right (or really any politician or think tank blabber) doesn't trump the "free market" anymore? It used to be every other minute on CNN in the 1990s and 2000s. Why is that? Well, pretty simple, the corporate powers have all largely settled into cartel, duopoly, or outright monopoly alignments within their markets. Market competition is pretty weak in the US, and it is hurting our competitiveness worldwide. The reality is that the nth-iterative stability of "free markets" in the real world with barriers to entry and even more important, regulatory capture, is cartel in best case. A lot of the centralization of wealth in the US is through the large cartel megacorporations. Using those, the "elite" can extract wealth and wage war on labor costs, which goddamn they LOVE to do, more than shirk taxes. Oh, and the megacorporations also enable massive tax avoidance (loans on existing unrealized stock value as a great example). So what the government SHOULD be doing is antitrust right and left, and breaking up all these monopolies and cartels. It would inject a huge amount of labor demand (at good job wages), a huge amount of anti-inflationary competition, and produce massive amounts of innovation, since you'd have a dozen companies trying different products and production methods in markets, as opposed to ... two.

gregw2 2y ago
I am sympathetic to your argument. I just would like to point out the irony that you want to break up companies to improve our global competitiveness. I seem to recall hearing in the late 90s and early 2000s a theme that the US really needed to let these companies combine so we could have large national players who would have the scale to compete globally with other nations' mega-corps. (Not so much in terms of FAANG tech perhaps, but certainly in banking and many other sectors.) I'm not sure if there is some definitive research on what corporate size truly helps global competitiveness (but I'd expect that, as you say, smaller competitors in larger numbers tend to be more competitive.) But even in China car industry as transitioning today, the natural evolution of such a system is towards a fewer larger competitors. Kind of related to the iron law of oligarchy perhaps, this phenomena? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy