Trust-busting was a thing in the past, Teddy Roosevelt was known as the trust-buster, and ran against Taft with the Bull Moose party, splitting the R vote. Taft actually was more prolific with trust-busting than Teddy, it may be his biggest presidential legacy.<p>Gary Kasparov pointed this Taft fact out as well, so people are thinking about the need to break up monops.<p>I sort of worry with a global system, you break up a local monopoly, will a foreign monopoly take over the vacuum?
> Firstly - and somewhat controversially - the authors assert that low levels of competition lead to low levels of innovation (and hence lower levels of economic growth). This is controversial because Silicon Valley produces companies with very little competition (Google for example) that are clearly innovative<p>and they have eaten alive older companies that forgot how to innovate.<p>> Tepper and Hearn have written an angry book. It is angry at the regulators that have allowed non-competitive mergers to happen. It is angry at politicians and lobbyists in the pocket of supernormally profitable corporations.<p>What's wrong with an angry book? Those examples are things worth getting angry about.<p>> They endorse measures against tech companies that stop them leveraging monopolies on one sector into monopolies in another sector. They would have endorsed the break-up of Microsoft into an operating system company and an applications company.<p>Wouldn't have been the end of the world. Imagine if MS had split. Parts of it would have failed. But office on Linux would probably be a thing.
I don't agree with this writer's take on the AA incident.<p>Any airline has a right to ask you to exit their plane, just like a taxi driver can ask you to leave his taxi. They owe you a refund, and maybe compensation, but they don't OWE you transportation.<p>If you were getting into a taxi, and the driver (for some reason) determined that s/he couldn't take you to your destination, they have every right to ask you to exit the vehicle.<p>Other than some kind of life-threatening emergency, there is no scenario I can imagine where you could be in the right by refusing to exit the vehicle and insisting they take you anyway. If you did refuse, force-able removal is the logical next step.<p>Writer went on to suggest that racism was somehow involved, which is where I gave up on reading the article.
> Health insurance is consolidated to the point where in most states there is only one or two realistic choices<p>This. I'd love to see more work on smashing monopolies in the health industry than I would on working out ways to fund them.
The synthesis of the indigo color wiped out an entire monopoly. Before the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer the market relied heavily upon the import of natural indigo from India whom basically got wiped off the market in one season.
In yet another David vs. Goliath display of how the balancing of the market works in action a monopoly fell.
Simultaneously a new market got born; namely the blue (indigo) jeans market.
If you ever doubt that the market can handle the advent of monopolies - look no further than the pants you’re wearing!
IMO, Laizzes-Faire capitalism is the sort that, as of today, favors the larger players over the smaller fish in the sea.<p>Practically, that system is going to become worse than ever.