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Comment by skynet-9000 | Hacker News Reader

that's what socialism is (well, if they're govt controlled or effectively govt controlled). real capitalism encourages competition, and real entrepreneurs try to discourage it and gain an effective monopoly. that tension is part of the beauty of the whole thing, but when govt approves these mergers with government granted monopolies (i.e., the wireless spectrum), then it all goes to pot very fast.

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> real capitalism encourages competition

If you mean “the real system first described as ‘capitalism’”, no, it doesn’t.

If you mean “the abstract, never realized ‘ideal’ system that defenders of capitalism appeal to whenever criticism is levelled at real-world capitalism”, that's harder to assess since the descriptions of that system tend to be both internally inconsistent and incomplete. But nothing usually hear in those encourages competition, usually it's defenders just assert as an article of faith that restriction of competition requires active cooperation of government.

Real capitalism has never been tried!

Under "real" capitalism, the general idea is that monopolization would indeed occur sooner, as the oversight that the government would have would lack to exist.

The Sprint/T-Mobile merger that was proposed a decade ago was denied by the FTC. The recent merger was allowed by the FTC, thus reducing our number of cellular companies.

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