Right after deregulation, there are new entrants. Twenty years later, there are a very few giant companies. See telecom, airlines, etc.
We’ve been here before though, in the era of Standard Oil. They can be broken up, but it won’t just happen on its own. The government needs to take action.
The government is taking action. The government is in on this consolidation via investments, contracts, preferential legal & tax treatment, etc. Think about this from the government's perspective. The government would rather govern a small number of large entities instead of a large number of small entities, thus the government is incentivized to favor monopolies/oliogopolies. The government itself is a monopoly of power in many domains.
Sure, the government may intervene with a company getting too big, but the intervention is so the government can gain a foothold with that company. e.g. any telecommunications platform will need to have back doors for the law enforcement agencies or said telecommunications platform will not be allowed to operate.
According to what incentives? The government’s responsibility is to the country at large.
Congress sure is, as it was with Standard Oil. It was the Supreme Court that saved us that time, I'm not sure what our hope is now.
As a UK resident, i'm astonished how the almost prophetic wisdom of the Founding Fathers can go ignored for so long by their spiritual heirs.
> Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight) the common
> & continual mischiefs of the spirit of Party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise People to discourage and restrain it.
> It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the Public Administration. It agitates the Community with
> ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot & insurrection.
> It opens the door to foreign influence & corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-20-02-...
If interested, Standard Oil was drawn as an octopus in Puck magazine (1904). The Library of Congress notes: "Illustration shows a "Standard Oil" storage tank as an octopus with many tentacles wrapped around the steel, copper, and shipping industries, as well as a state house, the U.S. Capitol, and one tentacle reaching for the White House." [0]
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Consumer prices fall, and US consumers' brains just turn off when you show them slaves in the supply chain.
Consumer prices rise, and then people hit the street - everywhere, globally.
It doesn't really matter if their dollar is going to Amazon or 1,000,000 small main street shops. Indeed, both are sourcing the bulk of their goods from places with slave labor. Your gripe is about low prices, not "society," and like, what's your solution?
tl;dr: it doesn't cost a million dollars to effect political change with money.
I think politically engaged (and frustrated!) people overestimate the exclusivity of lobbying and the power of donations. My understanding (I can't find figures right now) is that you can get a lot of access for probably less than you think. Sick of potholes? Donate $1000 to your mayor and you might find yourself face to face complaining about how many tires you lose per year.
I think someone wrote an article about how much it costs a single person with a single issue to get attention from a politician ('s team), or how little it costs, as the case may be. Yes, hiring a lobbying agency is more expensive, but that's more of a wide-spectrum approach.
There is enough money in these HN threads for people to donate $1000 to each of several politicians in the pursuit of tightening antitrust enforcement, but there's probably just as many who support the current policies. I didn't say it would be easy, but with some money and organization it's not impossible. Of course that's how every special interest started...
Is it not obvious why this approach doesn't scale to confronting monopoly power?
I believe it was Al Franken I heard talking about this, and he said that often times politicians end up voting with the lobbyist desires because no one ever lobbied the other side of the issue. For instance an energy lobbyist asking for the inclusion of exemptions for it's potentially overweight trucks on local roads to support the new gas well jobs created, that "will easily make up the potential and definitely trivial road repair costs".
Nobody shows up to lobby the other side of the story. The energy company painted it perfectly as a 100% good thing, while someone could have donated $200 and after bit a research shown it was actually a sham and the official would have agreed. But no one did.
Every year we look at firms above some size, and if they fail the saving throw, we liquidate them. Everyone who works there gets 6 months severance, all supplier contracts are terminated, everything they supply likewise. Get a bankruptcy administrator to sell the chairs and real estate, give the shareholders whatever is left.
If it's truly valuable what they do someone will find a way to do it again. If it's just a power position they were exploiting, we'll be free from their tyranny.
It is better than that. If it is truly valuable we'll already have someone else doing it just because of the risk of it failing its saving throw.
I also agree, that we lose real and valuable economic agility, when we fail to let big companies die and be picked apart / liquidated.
We effectively eliminate the bottom half of the food chain (decomposers, etc), to keep formerly apex predators alive with processed food pellets, in a zombie like state. But one day we’ll run out of food pellets, what will happen then?
We don’t allow whales to fall anymore [1]. And it hurts the ecosystem.
as for lobbying, America has been through this before. The Gilded Age saw lobbying to an even more extreme degree, with companies like US Steel and Standard Oil able to basically pay off senators. The same thing happened with slave plantations in the 1850s. After the great depression (and even before to some small extent; see the breakup of Standard Oil), laws were put into place heavily curbing lobbying, insider trading, among other things (like stock buybacks). Really, we're in another Gilded Age, and one day the balance of power between the individual, the state, and the industry will shift again.
That's been fixed. Amazon, Google, WalMart, Alibaba, etc. have worldwide operations without major scaling problems. Those companies can adapt and change reasonably rapidly. The knowledge of how to do this is widespread. This is new. An inherent limit on bigness has been eliminated.
Companies don't need to compete with state power because they can have state power. They can essentially become states within the state. A large enough landowner can be a de facto legal jurisdiction with its own law enforcement arm. Large-scale landlords and employers can simply make and enforce any rule that isn't explicitly illegal. And in addition to eviction and firing (both of which can be catastrophic to many people) they can simply hire "off-duty" police officers to do their law enforcement. Those cops can use more or less all of their police tools and methods, and they can find a reason to arrest and charge more or less anyone in service of their masters.
And in some US states, it is legal for companies to simply have their own private police force, paid by the company and with all the powers of a state police force.
Good Atlantic article on the subject: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/how-ame...
[0] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544
Fundamentally, capitalism is about handling economic planning in an efficient way by free-market autoregulation and policy makers who nurture competition to ensure that process continues to happen efficiently.
If competition and free markets are a necessary components of capitalism, then you would conclude - for instance - that the US stopped being a capitalistic country in the late XIXth century with so many prominent trusts. Or perhaps it never was capitalistic before WWII, since policy makers did not nurture competition but rather attempted to shield local industries from foreign competitions.
[0] Wikipedia definition: Ordoliberalism is the German variant of economic liberalism that emphasizes the need for the state to ensure that the free market produces results close to its theoretical potential
Then I found myself in significant agreement with the following paragraph from the Wikipedia article:
>Ordoliberal theory holds that the state must create a proper legal environment for the economy and maintain a healthy level of competition through measures that adhere to market principles. This is the foundation of its legitimacy.[9] The concern is that, if the state does not take active measures to foster competition, firms with monopoly (or oligopoly) power will emerge, which will not only subvert the advantages offered by the market economy, but also possibly undermine good government, since strong economic power can be transformed into political power.
However, I still hold some skepticism about this concept, since it often seems like, at least in the US, that government interventions are what serve to dissuade competition.
Either way, thank you for your input. I find it very interesting, especially because I've often admired the Germans' modern economic management which seems largely based on ordoliberalism.
Don't forget media companies. Everybody forgets media companies because media companies that have no qualms writing articles condemning mergers by Bank of America have a different incentive when it comes time to look in the mirror.
This has all been financed by more than a decade of low interest rates which fuelled the M&A.
The "new conservatives" and religious fundamentalists found they had a president they could control who was slowly forgetting everything he knew, and they used that to the fullest advantage.
Much of where we are today is due to the processes that began then, from (lack of) fairness in news reporting to the permissive corporate laws that allowed private equity and corporate raiding to relaxation of banking and securities laws that allowed 2008 to happen.
There have been some ups and downs between the 80s and today, and a few Democratic years, but in general the slide has continued because once money gets into politics, it won't leave quietly... it has to be forced out.
Look how the US lags in Chip & Pin.
Having a lot of local monopolies is worse than larger regulated ones in my opinion.
Can you clarify what you mean? The National Bank Act was originally written in 1863.
And then in 1999, even more deregulation.[2]
[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/j...
I can't think of a worse example of regulation. People obviously want to be able to access their money when they travel 30 minutes away. Your example undermines your point.
Look, I understand most hacker news readers do banking online, but the notion that banks are limited to a single state requires either that people rarely go out of state or never need to go to a physical branch. Neither is true in 2021. The former (not traveling) is more common than the later (not needing to go to a physical branch).
You seem to be proposing purely online banking. I take it you don't own a home or a car or a business? Most loans still require an in person meeting.
That's not quite right. [1]
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/fractionalreservebankin...