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Comment by rokkitmensch | Hacker News Reader

Let's go the other way! Any of these corporate entities that control am entire vertical were produced by the centralizing logic of the US economy and legal landscape. Boeing is but the USG's plane manufacturing division, masquerading as a public company. Live Nation is the defacto ticketing provider. As government (created, controlled) entities, it's entirely reasonable to me to call this a tax.

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Boeing is not the only airplane manufacturer in US. If you look how it operates, it runs the government’s civil aviation, not the other way around. FAA has basically trusted Boeing to self-certify everything. It looks like without government interventions the only outcome is total monopolization.

It’s really funny that anti-governmental slogans of the ideological fights of the Cold War during which US Government was way more powerful than it was not got into the brains of so many people. As someone who grew up in USSR that’s really funny to observe.

It's a cheap example, banks might have been better what with the obviously costly AML/KYC and bookkeeping requirements (not that these are bad, merely that they tend to centralize and concentrate actors so the fixed costs can be amortized more efficiently over a greater number of clients).

Airframe certification is so costly that nobody's making new ones would be the counterargument re Boeing, but like I said they're a cheap example.

More broadly, "regulatory capture" is another driver of the centralizing black hole at the heart of the USG.

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