Statutory antitrust regulation would be fantastic. Instead of litigation, the regulators, corporations, and shareholders know when a business must split or divest. The firm files a plan, it gets approved, everyone wins except monopolists.
Not a bad idea honestly. Would be interesting to see how it affects tech companies since they rely on hypergrowth. My one worry is that instead of divesting they would just play shell games with complex ownership structures.
Berkshire Hathaway: it's a holding company, spin out the big holdings
Nvidia (this one is tougher): Ethernet, Video Cards, AI cards; maybe chipsets vs cards?
Meta: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. Or ... split out the internal Cloud Services from the frontends.
TSMC: I dunno what to do here, but it's also not a US corp, so yeah. You could spin off fabs by node maybe.
United Health: not a tech company, but Insurance (possibly spin out regionally), Regional Healthcare Providers, Pharmacy Stuff
There's potential to break up some of the other companies along regional lines, like the Baby Bells ... but IMHO, that doesn't make that much sense for most of these.
Have some sort of phase-in, but if ownership between formerly related companies remains similar, contracts between them need to be a) public, b) terms must be available to others (FRAND). For cases where the spun-off companies are still market dominant (a lot of what I've suggested), constrain the company from entering other markets; this doesn't end the monopoly, but it prevents using one dominant position to establish another.
Not OP but a progressive tax generally scales non-linearly to tax higher brackets a higher %. So then you have an increasingly lower / decreasing incentive to make even more money.
Many countries already have a progressive tax on income, but that is irrelevant to business profits.
Yep, exactly. There's an easy way to make it gradual, too: put the "heel" of the progressive tax above where the largest American companies are and let inflation bring them into the curve. They can either pay a tax cost not to split, or they can split.
Alternatively, don't. I expect this proposal to be popular with executives regardless because it creates new spots for executives, just as it does with lower-flying labor.
The classic example is airline deregulation which happened under Carter. The real cost of flights is way, way down since then. But this doesn't stop people from complaining about how "flying is a worse experience now" and wishing for a return to inane regulations.
Were you alive in the 80s? Flying really was better back then. The food was edible. The seats weren't optimized for torture.
"Inane regulations", however misguided, generally exist to prevent the Torment Nexus. PE devolves companies into the Torment Nexus to create more profit.
I'm aware that flying was more enjoyable pre reform. And we could make it that enjoyable today by inflating the prices by 50-100%. The food would be better, the seats would be bigger, and planes would be emptier.
But the downside is that flying would be for rich people, just like it was pre-reforms. The poors would have to take trains or drive. Is that a good trade-off?
And to top it off, if you want to pay for a premium flying experience today, you can! For similar prices (to pre-reform flights, in real terms) you can book a "luxury flight".
I want more expensive flights because the rabble shouldn’t be flying. Flying is a worse experience now and cheap flights like spirit is how you get the Burger King crown guy being a common occurrence on flights.
Summary of the old regime: Mergers that lead to 5+% market share were blocked.
Then the "consumer harm in terms of prices" was adopted. Which swung the pendulum the other way. That is the fundamental economic policy now. Which has lead to abhorrent results.
> The US economy generally did very well with those standards
Spurious correlation. Few experts (economists) think old regulations caused economic growth.
If we really want to recreate post-war growth, we should destroy half our infastructure and fight a world war. Then, in the years following the end of that war, we can experience catch-up growth.
free market capitalism will always end like this though. the end goal of capitalism is the consolidation of all things into a megacorporation or oligarchy that controls everything, creates nothing, and earns infinite money
Why is this downvoted? To me, it seems like a self-evident conclusion. Even the supporters of the current system would probably agree with it. When you have a system that encourages endless growth at absolutely all costs, while placing no limits at the amount of power a single entity can hold, what other outcome can there be but the biggest players absorbing everything into themselves and using their influence over people and governments to guarantee their dominance?
These mega-strong players always kill themselves and collapse. We can see this on the global geopolitical scale (which fundamentally acts as a true free market), where all the empires have always fallen.
The stressing part is when they are at their peak, so people would like to use regulation to short-cut right to the collapse part.
The only example we have a true free market victor that hasn't collapsed is humans, who have totally and completely dominated all other life on Earth, but man, it's certainly not looking good for us right now.
But does that collapse happen because of some universal axiom about controlling humans, or were those empires merely limited by what was possible in their era? This is the first time in history we have so much military power, ways to exert influence that's truly world-spanning, the most sophisticated technology and the most thorough surveillance ever - all at the same time. Whatever barrier there might be, who's to say that today's megacorporations won't be able to push past it?
I'd say the axiom is that as your system becomes larger, more complex, the number of stable states it can exist in shrink. Which is something that is just generally true about systems.
We can envision a future with an ASI controlled super corporation that owns everything with omnipresent micromanagement, but then why would the ASI even bother with humans. That event right there would be our "got to powerful for our(humans) own good" moment.
We haven't had a free market in the United States in awhile. It's public-private partnered market fixing. Which is good for the consumer, many times, though not all the time.
Is there a difference in terms of outcomes? In the final form of a complete 'free market' without a government, the biggest entity would simply replicate the same levers of power that a government has through private militias, issuing scrip, having their own private courts and so on. But, since the US has a powerful government, it's much cheaper, simpler and more stable for them to just buy out as much of it as possible and use the same power through a proxy. Admittedly, the US government is not completely controlled by them, so it could still get much worse.
I had the pleasure of growing up around gray markets (relatively free, bribes were predictable & reasonable enough for an average noodle seller) in Southeast Asia in the 90s. It's quite different from large corporations getting Federal agencies and municipalities to lock out any potential competition. The enforcement of the US govt is far stronger than the enforcement of a handful of corrupt cops, as each precinct is essentially its own feudal regime, and within the department you have individuals mostly loyal to their families. A corrupt cop in a corrupt system driven by loose associations of extended families & fictive kin groups, one of five in a neighborhood say, can be pressured by a group of aunties and uncles serving street food or pirated goods through a web of personal relationships. This was much easier for them than hiring a lobbyist here would be.
I'm not saying it's better, rule of law has many benefits, but it is an example of where there were markets which were more free, that did not have cyberpunk outcomes, and they were quite different.
I'll say that I don't know anything about 90s SEA, but I know a bit about gray markets. One thing that stands out to me in your description is that all the corruption is incredibly localized and small-scale. Everything happens at the scale of individuals. And I don't deny that living under these conditions won't be that bad (a single corrupt official's power can only go so far), but what's stopping it from eventually becoming more organized? With us encouraging endless growth of wealth and influence, corrupt individuals are bound to form groups, then rings, then whole organizations. To me, what you're describing seems like a transitory state caused by societal factors, instability and simply not having had enough time. What the thread is all about is end states. We're already in a place where removing government regulation would turn our biggest players into those same cops, except with trillions of dollars, offices in every country and an ability to get their hands onto anything that money can buy.
I'm saying that those biggest players and our governments already work hand in hand to do that. Which is to say, the government is used as the enforcement arm for corporate interests. This is less "free" market, and more market commanded by interests.
I don't dispute OP, but Adam Smith's premise was that the free market and "invisible hand" were meant to benefit society as a whole, and the minimal government intervention was there to enforce that. Therefore one could argue that the kind of capitalism we have today is not Smiths's original vision, but rather, a failure to implement that vision.
To be clear, I am not defending the position, and maybe that vision just cannot be implemented in practice, or the premise is wrong, etc. Just trying to answer the question as to why OP might be downvoted. We cannot generally conflate defenders of free-market capitalism with defenders of the existing capitalism. I've heard such arguments before, maybe somebody can elaborate in more detail.
In my experience, most self-proclaimed "capitalists" either lap up the scholastic propaganda that capitalism is the 'bestest' economic system in the world, or are a real capitalist and don't have to give one fuck about what others say.
And most of these types NEVER read past, say, page 20 of https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38194/38194-h/38194-h.htm , Adam Smiths treatise on capitalism. Here's a few failures that Smith wrote back in his initial treatise in 1776. I think so far, we're failing every one of these, and basically speedrunning all the terrible warnings Smith wrote about as accomplishments.
Gross inequality was even mentioned there as something to significantly avoid. Book I, Ch. X, Part II; ~p. 50
Principal-agent problems in joint-stock companies. Managers of other people's money "cannot be expected to watch over it with the same anxious vigilance" as owners, leading to waste and negligence. Book V, Ch. I, Part III; ~p. 312-313
Mercantilist policy distortions. Protectionism, export bounties, and import restrictions enrich narrow merchant interests while reducing national wealth by intentionally misallocating capital. Book IV, Ch. II-V; ~p. 183-213
Underprovision of public goods. Markets fail to supply infrastructure (roads, bridges, canals, harbors) and institutions that benefit society broadly but yield no direct profit to private actors. Book V, Ch. I, Part III, Art. I; ~p. 303-305. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-cities-...
Dehumanizing effects of extreme division of labor. Repetitive specialized labor "renders [the worker] as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become," impairing civic and moral capacities. Book V, Ch. I, Part III, Art. II; ~p. 324 . Even in the 1800's this got so bad that Karl Marx wrote about this in both of his critique of capitalism AND the communist manifesto.
Merchant collusion and monopoly power. Smith warns that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices". Book I, Ch. X, Part II; ~p. 54 . Hello, eggs, meat packers,oil products (gasoline), grocery chains, electronics (RAM), health care. Collusion after collusion, and almost no enforcement.
Im not communist, and probably not socialist. But its clear as day as to the failures of capitalism. And as a stopped clock is right 2x a day, capitalism does handle some problems better than any previous system. But we can do better. Lots better. But the entrenched power holds on to capitalism as fervent as a religion, and not dispassionate analysis.
How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired? What about acquihires? Cant stop that - employees have their own agency.
> How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired?
For the record: national economic policy shouldn't revolve around Y Combinator classes and similar startups.
I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups. I'm not saying one will, but I'm saying that's a cost I'm willing to pay.
YC startups could just become mature businesses. Nothing wrong with providing a good service, earning a good profit, and employees maturing into stable careers.
I think the really important question is HOW this will happen. If you mean for the state to buy them at fair market value, nobody will object to that, not even if it closes the door to private equity.
But that's not what you're talking about, is it?
How about doing what America used to do? Provide seed funding for a new fire truck company in trade for condictions. Can we agree to do that? Fund 3 companies to make fire trucks, fast-track whatever certification and approvals they need. Create the companies we need, risking (and in fact expecting to lose) a bunch of the capital used for this.
The OP explicitly answers this: go back to pre-80s antitrust policy. Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers.
And they want to do it again and enforce anti trust laws? I don't see any contradiction here. Break up faang and keep a close eye on all these acquisitions the ai companies are doing and why they need to own package management and code editors and etc.
Yes, breaking up things wasn't bad, it was the completely lax failure to continue this action and to regulate corporations that got us rafts of stupid ass legislation culminating in citizens united. "Too big to fail" companies are just government entities that are not regulated properly.
> It did not work though. Bell and Standard Oil are notable examples. What else?
That's pretty unfair. IIRC, Standard Oil was on of the companies that was the impetus for antitrust law (and broken up by it), and AT&T was broken up (famously) in the 80s.
Basically, your "argument" is a troll or a deep and basic misunderstanding. Especially in the case of Standard Oil. You're basically saying the law doesn't work because it didn't work before it existed (Standard Oil became dominant in the 1870s or 1880s and the Sherman Antitrust act wasn't passed until 1890).
1. If you are proposing something even stricter than previous antitrust rules, great. But getting back to antitrust itself is actionable is step 1.
2. You don’t have to prevent every case before it happens so much as just stochastically go after the worst ones to make it less economical for people to go take on debt to have huge swaths of consolidation. Letting the market work, after pricing in that egregious monopolies will be broken up, is kinda great and better than minutely scrutinizing every tiny deal for long-term consequences.
If you want to move the goalpost of the conversation that's fine, but it's different from what the previous person was talking about, and why it doesn't make sense to blow up at them for it.
> You are a troll. There's nothing left to say. Bye.
is a wildly disproportionate response to the post, IMHO.
> Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?
Antitrust enforcement can be done retroactively as well, if it appears that a large company abuses its financial firepower to undercut competitors or a marketshare gets too dominant.
It was absolutely actionable and implemented as policy for decades, what are you even talking about? Your phrasing pretends this isn’t exactly how antitrust enforcement worked before the much more recent approach began.
You're alluding to some second order effects which are real but also able to be dealt with, and have been.
Montgomery Ward thought it was "too big to fail" and too powerful to regulate.
So, what happened?
If the US government wants to, and it has in the past, it just takes your business at gunpoint.
4 soldiers walked into the ultra-conservative owners office and made him leave. Two of them picked up his arms and legs, took him outside, and deposited him on the sidewalk.
> a major U.S. CEO being physically evicted from his own company by armed troops became one of the most famous news photos of the home-front war
If the acquirer has too big or dominant position already in the specific sector no. They should not be able to sweep the board of all companies doing single thing.
If the acquirer attempts to acquire a startup (regardless of investor) for anti trust reasons, or there are anti trust concerns, the M&A activity is disallowed by regulators. A recent example is Figma and Adobe.
What definition of success are we using that having over $7 billion in net income after expenses in 2025, and nearly $2 billion so far this year, is "doing very poorly"?
I am not an anti trust enforcer or scholar, so I'm going to defer to experts in the field: Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, etc. That is the point of experts in a domain.
Quite clearly the word "consolidation" is referring not to acquisitions, but to M&A activity that achieves a certain level of, you know, consolidation.
It really is sad that any disagreement with “pe is bad” means i am concerned trolling. Ever consider the guidelines are actually vague which is why usa keeps failing in attempts to enforce?
> Ever consider the guidelines are actually vague which is why usa keeps failing in attempts to enforce?
Your cause and effect is wrong.
The US doesn't fail to attempt to enforce, the gov representatives often get paid to not enforce by said corporations who have been allowed to put money into their campaign for election/reelection.
Don’t confuse the nature of the feedback you’re receiving here. Your comments in this thread are so obstinate and so far from this forum’s standards of good faith argument that community members can’t help but perceive you as a troll.
Nobody likes this state of affairs so we are asking you to stop strawmanning and start steelmanning the posts you are responding to.
You are clearly not dumb, so stop responding to the dumbest possible and easiest to dismiss interpretation of other people’s comments and instead go deeper
Generally you don't hold a market dominant position in any sector that anti-trust regulators care about at 15 employees?
Frankly this stuff is impossible to talk about in the abstract. The details of every individual case matters. If you're actually curious (instead of just playing a shell game), you can go look up the types of analysis that FTC does to evaluate market dominance and whether a given transaction will excessively consolidate a market.
Single family used to act as a check on greed. Careless institutional investment was limited to multi family. They couldn’t push multi family rents beyond single family. Once institutional got into single family, everything became uncapped. It’s harder for millions of small landlords competing for tenants to act as a cartel than it is for a few large landlords taking up marginal supply.
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