> aggressive trust-busting beyond what the DOJ has done historically, including vertical integrations.
Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just <shrug>, who could have known?
I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.
Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.
We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.
> The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it
Surely, the reason you want to keep it is because owning and controlling thing A and thing B allows you to make more profit personally than being a controlling owner of thing A or thing B.
That said, I agree with your post and also think nations should err more on the side of breaking things up.
Concentrations of power distort markets and resist democratic control.
Vertical integration was a huge part of what they went after historically, until a bunch of people "convinced" the US that the standard should be "consumer harm." The cool thing about consumer harm is that you can come up with any bullshit argument about how prices will go down and access and quality up in the future from some merger, and nobody can disprove it because it's a counterfactual (he said, she said.) And when prices go up, it's just <shrug>, who could have known?
I know what vertical integration is today, though. It's not a hypothetical, it's a selling point to investors. I can just tell you no. Any clear metrics or standards for antitrust action can't be tolerated. The goal is to force us to go on vibes. Then they say we have bad vibes.
Competition brings down prices. Laissez-faire leads to pseudo-Communism with royal families, courtiers, and technicians making up the top 10%, and everybody else gets to be a (debt) slave i.e. feudalism.
We should err towards breaking more things up than would be ideal, not less. If I make you divest from something, you sell it and get whatever future value out of it today. It's not a punishment according to SCOTUS when they're looking at TikTok (which is why they said the TikTok ban wasn't a bill of attainder.) We charter these companies, and they operate for our benefit, which is why we grant them limited liability and a whole bunch of other treats. What you divest is going to go to somebody just like you, but someone who is not financially entangled with you. The only reason you want to keep it all is to do things that I don't want you to do with it, I don't want you doing unproductive market manipulation, I want you to put that energy into competing.