Monopoly power was a much bigger concern in the past than it is today. Why aren't people more concerned about this?:
A New Age of Monopolies, by Thomas frank, Commentary, WSJ: ...Barry C. Lynn's recent book ... arises directly from the old antitrust tradition, and it presents us with an amazing catalogue of present-day monopolies, oligopolies and economic combinations. Its subjects are, by definition, some of the largest and most powerful organizations in the world. And yet almost none of it was familiar to me.
Mr. Lynn tells us, for example, about the power of single companies or small groups of companies over such disparate fields as eyeglasses, certain categories of pet food, washer-dryer sales, auto parts, many aspects of food processing, surfboards, medical syringes...
Nor had I ever heard about what Mr. Lynn calls "the vitamin cartel," or the "nearly complete roll-up" of advertising agencies, or that the "key industrial legacy" of now-imprisoned business executive Dennis Kozlowski was a company "that specialized in forging monopolies over U.S. marketplaces for everything from catheters to fire sprinklers to clothes hangers," or that a recent management book encourages readers to see monopoly power as the main goal of business strategy.
Mr. Lynn is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington; he first came to my attention with a memorable 2006 essay in Harper's Magazine in which he described the power Wal-Mart exerted over its suppliers...
Mr. Lynn ... describes companies that swallow their rivals and then, with competitive pressure diminished, set about "destroying product variety and diversity." ... We learn of entire industries where competitors have grown so close to one another that a collapse at one company would probably bring down many of the others as well.
This is, we are often reminded, a populist age, with fresh flare-ups of fury every time Wall Street bonuses hit the headlines. ...Mr. Lynn's anger at the Wall Street bailout, his fondness for small business, and his frequent homages to the nation's founders may seem superficially similar to the attitudes of the tea party protesters. But Mr. Lynn also takes pains to demonstrate that the economic "freedom" so beloved by the snake-flag set has actually yielded the opposite of freedom: a "neofeudal" system of "private corporate governments" answerable to no one. ...
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