Thank the GOP for basically ridding the US of antitrust law, which is now basically no longer a thing.
contemporary democrats are not any better, they make hella frequent concessions to anti-competitive business practices under the guise of licensing or stimulus
This is why US democrats are considered center-right compared to the rest of the world.
What makes the rest of the world any better than US by using them as a metric.
The guys who claim capitalism works because a free market will create better things through competition. Guess they weren’t so much for the competition stuff and just became puppets for corporations. We also have it completely legal to openly bribe politicians which makes zero fucking sense, except we call it lobbying so it somehow becomes okay.
Only thing worse than free market capitalism is state sponsored. Decades of the fed flooding the big banks with capital to loan, taxes taken from everyone but the largest corps, and regulatory capture (see copy right for this topic), and we get corporations that demand difficult anti trust actions just to slow down.
That’s not a black and white system, it’s not one or the other. Every system will have aspects of both in them.
Only pure liberals think leaving the free market by itself with minimal regulation is a good thing. Capital attracts capital and becomes basically a snowball.
But is the solution a market controlled by a centralized entity? You just pointed out politicians can also be corrupted. So… Giving more power to an entity that can be corrupted is the solution?
The problem is corruption. Any system you can propose can be fucked up by corruption. The justice system, politicians and government can be corrupted under any system because they are human.
If I’m wrong, just propose any system and I’ll tell you how it crumbles because of corruption.
I think they’re still there, just haven’t been trotted out in recent history. And mergers keep getting approved.
The last merger that got blocked was almost 50 years ago, I believe. So yeah…it’s probably dead.
Which was that? Also, DraftKings and FanDuel got rejected about 10 years ago
