America Is Not The Land Of The Free But One Of Monopolies So Predatory They Imperil The Nation

[Indeependent]

The US economy is becoming increasingly harmed by ever less competition, with fewer and fewer companies dominating sector after sector – from airlines to mobile phones. Market power is the most important concept in economics, he says. When firms dominate a sector, they invest and innovate less, they peg or raise prices, and they make super-normal profits by just existing (what economists call “economic rent”). So it is that mobile phone bills in the US are on average $100 a month, twice that of France and Germany, with the same story in broadband. Profits per passenger airline mile in the US are twice those in Europe. US healthcare is impossibly expensive, with drug companies fixing prices twice as high or even higher than those in Europe; health spending is 18% of GDP. Google, Amazon and Facebook have been allowed to become supermonopolies, buying up smaller challengers with no obstruction.

This monopolising process gums up everything. Investment in the US has been falling for 20 years. Because prices stay high, wages buy less, so workers’ lifestyles, unless they borrow, get squeezed in real terms while those at the top get paid ever more with impunity. Inequality escalates to unsupportable levels. Even life expectancy is now falling across the US.

America is not the land of the free but one of monopolies so predatory they imperil the nation | Will Hutton

We have allowed capitalism to become distorted by refusing to place and maintain its needed controls.

Proper controls and regulations are not a bane to capitalism, as some think; they're a critical component of it.

We learned nothing from the Meltdown.
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Be bold...
When translated does that mean “Father Government should ‘control’ all commodities”?

Why is this the first place your tiny mind goes to. Is this the only track you know?

Small companies are far more innovative and nimble than large conglomerates. If a small business owner has an idea, he simply tries it out, and if it works he goes with that, and redirects his resources to bringing this innovation to market.

If you have an idea in a large corporation, you have to submit the idea to management and "sell" them on the value of this innovation. Then you have to get the company to allocate the resources you need to make it happen. You may have to go through several layers of management in order to make this happen, and those above you are going to want to add their own ideas to your project as you go.

The two most innovative entrepreneurs of the past 100 years, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both started out with nothing but their ideas, and built from there. But Jobs was tossed out of Apple Corp. because he doesn't play well with others. When the company started to fail because they had no way to innovate without him, they brought him back, and pretty much left him to his own devices.

IBM used to be one of the most innovative companies in America. Once they became a behemmouth, they became less innovative. What was the last great innovation coming out of IBM, or Hewlitt Packard?

The problem has become that the largest corporations are gobbling up the successfully innovative companies, and that adds all of those layers of management to stifle innovation. I was hired by one such innovator. His small but very successful project management company which used a proprietary computer app to cut construction costs, was acquired by the largest real estate management company in the world. He made millions on the sale, and was now a Vice-President, in charge of the division he once owned. The sale gave him the resources to take his innovation world wide, but . . . He then went on to note that he had lost his automony. He had to conform to a different corporate culture and ethics. He was expected to "go along to get along" in corrupt countries. Given his druthers, he would not have even entered such markets. It was no longer his choice. His options were now to take the money and run, abandoning his "baby". There was a 5 year non-compete clause so he couldn't just use the money to "start over", and his great invention now belonged to someone else who would continue to profit from it, or stay in a corporate culture that made him uncomfortable.

But I also know the man who invented the technology to make the wireless, hand held credit and debit cards machines used in restaurants secure from hacking. I did his patent application. OkiData in Japan offering to make him a "very, very rich man" for the rights to his patent, but he wanted to exploit the technology himself. He had neither the capital, nor the ability to do that and ultimately went bankrupt, losing the rights to his invention in the bankruptcy when it was sold to the highest bidder to pay his creditors. One of the saddest business stories I know of.

Note:
IBM and MS were never innovative.
Apple was, and is, innovative.
I agree with the gist of your post.

 

[Indeependent]

The Lending software rejected the bad Loans that every Bank and Mortgage Lender rubber stamped.
Both Ds and Rs looked the other way.
The true abuse started under GWs 2nd term.

 

[Meister]

Thread closed, there is no original content from the OP