Everything you said sounds logical. But, it's a wide swath of information. What books/articles are you sourcing to piece this all together? I will say that it

Everything you said sounds logical. But, it's a wide swath of information. What books/articles are you sourcing to piece this all together? I will say that it is a complete mess. A lot of businesses today treat their customers and employees like garbage. On the other hand a lot of of the existing unions are parasitic so I understand criticisms on both sides. I can only suggest that it is because we have a very bad form of corporatism run amok in the US. Where regulation does exist it tends to support large companies (which I suppose is not much different from the picture in the 1970s). The left is afraid of big heartless business. The right is afraid of big inefficient government. We have a wonderful mix of both. Both sides are too busy screaming about the splinter in the other's eye that they miss the log in their own. > Nationalized and regulated businesses were stable, but seemed inefficient. They had no incentive to take risks to improve. The history of the Reagan era is well known, so that doesn't have to be repeated here, but reviewing the history of deregulation is useful. What seems to happen in deregulation of regulated monopolies is that a large number of new companies enter the field, and prices go down. Then most of the new companies go bust, and the winners consolidate. The result tends to be deregulated monopolies. How do you combat this? Both seem less than satisfactory.