The Monopolization of America

[elleng]

Last edited Wed Nov 28, 2018, 03:43 PM - Edit history (2)

'In one industry after another, big companies have become more dominant over the past 15 years, new data show.

The popular telling of the Boston Tea Party gets something wrong. The colonists were not responding to a tax increase. They were responding to the Tea Act of 1773, which granted a tea monopoly in the colonies to the well-connected East India Company. Merchants based in the Americas would be shut out of the market.

Many colonists, already upset about taxation without representation and other indignities, were enraged. In response, dozens of them stormed three ships in Boston Harbor on the night of Dec. 16, 1773, and tossed chests of East India tea — “that worst of plagues, the detested tea,” as one pamphlet put it — into the water.

A major spark for the American Revolution, then, was a protest against monopoly.

A strong strain of anti-monopoly sentiment has run through our politics ever since. America was born as “a nation of farmers and small-town entrepreneurs,” the historian Richard Hofstadter once wrote, “anti-authoritarian, egalitarian and competitive.” Hostility to corporate bigness animated Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the labor movement, Granger movement, Progressive movement and more. . .

So what are we going to do about it? It’s time for another political movement, one that borrows from the Boston Tea Partiers, Jefferson, T.R. and the other defenders of the economic little guy.

The beginnings of this movement are now visible. Top Democrats believe that anti-monopolism can be a political winner for their party. It’s a way to address voters’ anxiety over high drug prices, digital privacy and more. “The control of business over certain segments of the economy,” says Senator Amy Klobuchur of Minnesota, a potential presidential candidate, “I think it will be a much bigger thing going into 2020.”

Klobuchar has offered a good bill that would raise the legal standards for merger approval. But preventing future mergers won’t be enough. . .

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice and anti-monopoly crusader, said a century ago, “but we can’t have both.”'

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/opinion/monopolies-in-the-us.html?

[guillaumeb]

1. I vaguely remember something called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Reagan did much to ignore it, and encourage monopoly capitalism.

[elleng]

2. Yes, but many of us worked to maintain it,

even working in Fed. govt.

[guillaumeb]

3. I know.

The GOP would call that the deep state, as if it were some sort of cancer instead of the people who make the Government work for the citizens.

We know that Reagan and after him the modern GOP, look on the Government as an imposition And it is an imposition, and a hindrance, to those who work to enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow citizens.

[Farmer-Rick]

4. Monopolies are the end game of capitalism

Unregulated capitalism always leads to stifling monopolies because it tends to concentrate wealth.

So the real saying is "We may have democracy, or we my have unregulated capitalism, but we can't have both."

[elleng]

5. Unregulated capitalism cannot succeed.