Comment by Intralexical

Corporate consolidation, some would say. IIRC, at some point in the last some decades, the US got the bright idea that antitrust isn't really worth enforcing if potentially anticompetitive business practices and mergers can also result in lower prices.

That kinda works— Until a small handful of corporations gain enough power that there is not really any meaningful competition anymore, and they can effectively engage in price-gouging with monopoly power. Which has now happened, apparently, in most industries. …Hence everything getting worse.

…I think there was an article I read some time back that explained it really well. But I can't seem to find it, so these links will have to do. The Guardian/Youtube ones might seem clickbaity, but that man was also Clinton's Secretary of Labor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/11/compan...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMZKegjJurk

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/07/08/biden-assault-monop...

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

https://www.theverge.com/23645057/taylor-swift-ticketmaster-...

https://news.yale.edu/2024/04/24/lax-antitrust-enforcement-l...

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/675862

Ticketmaster, Facebook, grocery prices, even the Boeing 737 mess— I suppose a lot of these problems do basically come down to a company or an oligopoly getting so powerful that nobody can hold it accountable anymore.