Antitrust: Taking on Monopoly Power from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age

"Yes, she’s not an economist or a philosopher, but a politician. She ran for the nomination for president for the Democratic Party but didn’t make it. She’s from Minnesota, and the book really speaks of her and how she grew up over there. Americans are generally all immigrants or children of immigrants from other countries. They distrust government and big corporates, these huge faceless companies. She loves small companies where people know each other, where customers know each other. She speaks for that love for a world where nobody really has a lot of power over other people. We’re all at the same level, in a democratic system. She completely disagrees with the Chicago school that if companies produce fantastic products, you can let them grow big. She argues, like others, that what is fundamentally needed in a democratic system is a balance of power. When companies get too big, they become too powerful and they mistreat the customer, they mistreat their labor, they mistreat their communities. She says we simply need to reapply antitrust law again (she’s originally a lawyer, as is her husband). It’s a political statement. She says we need antitrust to rectify the imbalance between the rich and those of more modest income. She is angry about the power of money in corporate lobbying in Washington. She says we need to break up the big tech companies, to have divestments. There’s a big brouhaha at the moment about non-compete clauses: if you’re hired by a company, particularly in big tech, your contract typically says you can’t work for a company that competes with it for a number of years. You’re locked into that company, which gives the company a lot of power over you. She says that should not really be allowed. She argues against cross-ownership. She points out that the Vanguards and BlackRocks of this world are massive: they own shares in all companies. She argues that because Vanguard owns shares in every company that forces companies to work together rather than to compete against each other. She says that as an equity manager, it’s in your interest that these companies maximize their profits, rather than competing these profits away. I don’t think there’s any evidence of that, though. In America, we have concentration first in tech, then in the healthcare industry, then in banking, depending on how you measure it. Everybody talks about tech and pharma and the abusive pricing of pharmaceutical products. In Europe, there are price controls. It’s not that we have a lot of competition in Europe, it’s simply that the prices of pharmaceutical products are controlled. In the US they aren’t, and we have this horrible situation of prices going up by 2,000%. The healthcare industry has a lot of market power."