There has never been a predatory monopoly in a free market, all predatory monopolies have had government support. So in a genuine free market you would not need the restrictions, all that would be required is the rule of law.

Yay! Right on.

It is a wonderful thing to make a good product and to get rich by it. But...

There is a damn good reason why the rich, colonist founders of the USA got rid of the wealthy, monopolistic British. They did not want the monopolists to use their amazingly vast wealth to bribe politicians and rule the country as a merchant aristocracy.

A monopoly does not simply monopolize a single market, so that there would be thousands of little monopolies out there, each making a different product. Through "vertical integration," monopolies attempt to suck up every business in the cycle (suppliers & distributors), while through "horizontal integration" they obtain as many marketing-related businesses ("synergy") and competitors as they can—and they would certainly buy & sell us workers & consumers too, if they weren't prevented from doing so by that pesky Constitution of ours.

When a business has tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions in cash, they can also forestall the "creative destruction" of their business by crushing competition until they have pinched every last penny/erg/unit out of it and position themselves to control the next wave (so that the innovators/engineers end up as their "employees" instead of as independent entrepreneurs). Thus, though there is "progress," it is crippled and not nearly as rapid as it could be, while benefiting fewer people.

ALL monoplies tend toward sloppier products because no matter how badly they do, they always see a growing bottom line, and have no gauge (competitors) to see how well it can be done. And, if people can somehow manage to go without their product (and all the substitute products that the monopoly owns too), the monopoly will simply raise the price for those still buying their product (or what they believe are substitutes, but are really made by a division of the monopoly—or with supplies from that monopoly).

I simply cannot find any reason to favor monopolism unless one owns a monopoly and thinks it will be the monopoly that will someday own all the other monopolies...

I would like to see how people in this country would react if right on the face of all their products was the corporate label of the company that owned the company that owned the company...

Seriously, I believe they would think they woke up into a Twilight Zone episode!

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Hehetchetu. Wa uyun tinkte!

>>>I would say that whoever made up that test is a typical leftwing pinko economics professor who doesn't like paying for corporate Gulfstreams.

>>>Goddam, but you're sounding more like a lily-livered Democrat every day.

My bro-in-law imports re-bar from Korea and China. He can pay for shipping (not cheap for re-bar) and still sell it for less here than it can be manufactured and sold in America. The import taxes are not high enough.

But, in order to make newer businesses more stable should we the government step-in, or should we just let the people decide between monopolies and Ma-and-Pa shops?

For example: I get all my M-rated games from Gamestop, should the government step-in to protect smaller video game stores and choose the video game chain I shop from? Or screw the smaller businesses, and let me buy my damn video games?!!

Another economics question: if an independent medical company suddenly makes a pill that automatically kills a cancerous tumour and be able to charge whatver they want for it, or should the government step-in and take over their product?

The answer depends on your view of free markets and competition. If you believe in free markets and competition, the answer is yes. If you believe in government control of the economy and the government choosing the winners and losers, you will grant the corporation a monopoly, called a patent, and help them prevent competitors offering a lower priced, better quality product which takes their market share and drives out their monopoly profit.

Note that there is no requirement to patent a drug or anything else, and one can protect one's idea by keeping it secret. The problem is that the mere existence of your product on the market makes it clear that the product can exist, so the hundreds of people who did most of the work to make that product possible, all the chemists and researchers and grad students and private research foundations and government research grants, will also find it easy to reinvent the key idea and improve on it. What patents promoted was the publication of ideas, instead of keeping them secret, in order to speed up the competitive process, and thus make the patents pretty worthless as new innovations beat them out.

Bottom line is that conservatives are largely anti-free market because the free market requires constant effort to stay competitive and that disturbs the social order as young people and immigrants get ahead the start competing with the lazy old order of conservatives who think they deserve to have everyone else pay them for what they did a decade ago, or better yet, 50 years ago, or even better, get paid for what their ancestors did.