This is happening to every industry. There is an obvious consolidation and massive wealth transfer still ongoing. Sickening
It is pretty hard to find many examples where there's still a widespread set of small producers successfully staving off national consolidation.
It isn't clear to me how you, as a general matter, deal with the massive economies of scale that national chains have access to. Everything from much cheaper cost of capital to being able to cross-subsidize stores to better pricing power due to bulk buying to being able to simply hire better management due to have more free cash flow etc etc etc.
Every company has to get bigger by swallowing others, or instead be swallowed by another company that does it.
The board game "Monopoly" is a pretty good simplified simulation of the system's structures and operation. Fun for all in the early stages, not so much in the end game.
Monopoly is a vastly over simplified model that doesn't consider much of modern economics. Interestingly, it was actually invented to demonstrate to people how evil capitalism is[2].
[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/creativedestruction.asp
[2]: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170728-monopoly-was-i...
Close. Monopoly was created by Lizzie Magie, a Georgist, and its purpose was to demonstrate how evil land ownership by monopolies/rent seekers is and to advocate for a Land Value Tax [1]. Many of the forces you describe that apply to other areas in economics do not apply to land. You cannot create new land, after all.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)#Early_history
Like all economic systems, a strong and independent state/gov't is required to force-fix issues that don't make financial sense to fix (ex. FDA creation after The Jungle). I think our current system is suffering from regulatory capture, and I don't see a way to resolve this kind of near-corruption. Corporatism will continue until the system is no longer sustainable, which likely will never happen (within our lifetimes).
reality: Corporate welfare and record levels of poverty.
Then in the ashes you will get a verdant crop of new companies started by fresh people and a new period of massive growth with follow.
Might not be a cost that people actually want to pay though.
These are extremely independent problems.
The problem with concentration isn't taxes, it's a regulatory environment that promotes concentration. You take money from Bezos, it doesn't change the size of Amazon.
A UBI would help some by making it easier to start a small business, but unless you address the underlying regulatory problems that give every advantage to consolidated megacorps, that's not enough.
One of the big problems is taxes though, specifically the taxation of dividends that get reinvested. Under the existing system, if you're Apple and you make iPhones and pay dividends to shareholders who invest them in a separate company that makes microprocessors, they pay more tax than if Apple keeps the money and makes its own microprocessors. And it works that way for everything, so corporations grow without bound and the tax system encourages that.
The easy fix is to make investment a tax deduction but sale of an investment fully taxable instead of only on the gain. We already try to do this in a hundred places, 401k and Roth IRAs and not taxing gains until they're realized, because it's obviously a good idea and promotes investment. But because we specifically don't do it in the case where you take profits from one company and invest them into an independent one, we've been promoting indefinite corporate expansion for decades.
> This is happening to every industry. Sickening
the article goes on to say:
There is an obvious consolidation and massive wealth transfer still ongoing. There are people among us settling down on plots of land and growing more food than they can eat themselves, putting both hunters and gatherers out of work. Some of those unemployed hunters and gatherers are now sitting around and making more mocassins than their families can wear, and trading them with the farmers. Since there is already too much food and footwear, still others are reduced to making purely decorative clay objects and toys and trading them for food and footwear! And what about our shamans? There's this guy Moses who's got all the rules carved in stone for easy reference instead of oral story telling. All in the name of productivity and efficiency, alien ideas in our lands. These are scary times!