Amen. The continual hysteria about "growth" is goddamned annoying. Things can't grow forever. Can't they just make a healthy living?
Meanwhile, what the U.S. should be doing is ruthlessly cracking down on de facto monopolies and oligopolies that are ripping off Americans and making record profits, like meat... baby formula... and most of all TicketMaster.
This is supposed to be Free Enterprise's incentive to keep you competitive, i.e., you will lose it all if you don't keep your sprinting top notch. This is the nature of disruption. Look at what Uber did to the taxi industry (and the value of taxi medallions in NYC).
Oligarchies offer a way to buffer this effect, so that there can be several companies existing in an industry that slow-walk (disruptive) innovation and buy up competitors in their early stages. Hard to say how long an oligarchy can hold, though. Look at Intel & AMD, and how they're facing a serious test from ARM chips. Even further, what will the onset of Quantum Computing do to the market holds they have.
Free enterprise's nature as winner-take-all is what makes the difference here. Why was it that Friendster, Myspace, and Second Life could all co-exist, but when FaceBook came along they went defunct (mostly). In a more extreme example, consider robotics/AI and how it will replace humans. When robotic surgery is perfected, will 'manual' surgery even be considered 'safe' anymore?
Many of those same monopolies exist as a result of US agencies regulating companies in to non-existence. The ones the that you call monopolies happen to be the survivors.
Meanwhile, what the U.S. should be doing is ruthlessly cracking down on de facto monopolies and oligopolies that are ripping off Americans and making record profits, like meat... baby formula... and most of all TicketMaster.