Comment by habitue
2 years ago
Couple points:
Strong companies usually aren't killed in this way. They are making everyone money and their share price is too high to allow activists to get a controlling interest.
"Regulations are lobbied to the ground" is not what is described in the article. The regulation was to conserve fish, and it was so onerous to comply with that only large companies could do it efficiently. Assuming this description is accurate, regulation (i.e. non-free markets) is causing this side-effect of consolidation.
Now, is the regulation worth the side effect? If the consequence is overfishing, yeah, I'll take a little hit to market efficiency to avoid tragedy of the commons. Avoiding tragedy of the commons is a great thing for the government to regulate. The flip side is that the government should have enforced anti-trust better to prevent the consolidation.
There should be a law that allows companies to self split once they become monopolies. As in a person can collect evidence of a monopolie and then can walk out of the busters office with the standalone part of the company thats the monopoly as a compamy of its own. Make those that conspire and lobby for the r monopolies those who would profit the most on busting.
I like the fundamental idea, but I don't like that structure. My own proposal would be progressive corporate taxation that gets increasingly punitive at extreme scale, intentionally pushing companies to split. We could set the "heel" of the curve higher than existing companies and inflate our way into it to give them plenty of time to prepare. We would need limitations on ownership to prevent "notionally separate but actually owned by the same people" cheating, but that's doable.
It will never happen, of course. The purpose of capitalism is not to serve customers by fostering competition, the purpose of capitalism is to give rich people an excuse to pay themselves for being rich. To establish, reinforce, and perpetuate a class hierarchy where the people on the bottom must constantly pay to exist while the people on top get paid to exist through their stocks, bonds, and real estate holdings. From this cynical perspective monopolies are a feature, not a bug. But if they were a bug, progressive taxation is how you would fix it.