Comment by Straw
5 hours ago
If you wanted to do the most to improve competitiveness possible, by far the most effective strategy would be free trade. Trade barriers prevent competition from overseas, making monopolies much easier to maintain.
5 hours ago
If you wanted to do the most to improve competitiveness possible, by far the most effective strategy would be free trade. Trade barriers prevent competition from overseas, making monopolies much easier to maintain.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the barriers to entry as an example. An effective anti-monopoly strategy needs different tools at different times.
> Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
An economist....
Free trade has little impact on monopolies. The biggest corporations in the US are international and the massive amount of free trade we've had from Reagan to Trump's second term has only resulted in these companies becoming even more consolidated.
What free trade enables is for monopolistic corporations to take control of foreign resources to circumvent and undermine US labor laws. They'll buy the rights to the same crops growing in Mexico or Candida for cheaper than the US to undercut US farmers. None of that changes the price they are selling goods in the US and in fact ultimately results in prices going up in both Mexico and Candida.
You claim that a law that prevents or hinders you from making transactions with certain parties, while privileging other parties by exempting them from these restrictions, doesn't make it easier for the privileged parties to form a monopoly?
No, I claim that we spend 3 decades of free trade and we didn't see corporations get smaller. Republicans and Democrats had a free trade policy since Carter really.
If it were true that free trade results in more competition, then you'd expect that there would be more companies competing, not fewer. We see fewer companies.
Your theory has been tested in reality and it fails.
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