Assuming a society is generally operating under a capitalistic framework with some regulations, should that society try to limit the size of corporations? Say, through soft caps like progressive corporate tax rates up to 99%, or manual interventions like regulatory antitrust breakups, or whatever viable approaches there might be?
Today, it’s companies like Google/Alphabet. Yesterday it was Microsoft, last century it was the Bells, and the railroads before them.
Should these companies be broken up now… earlier… later… never?
Should the government only intervene if that company threatens competition, or whenever it reaches a certain size (by what measure? revenue, market cap, # of industries it’s dominant in, # of employees…)?
An arbitrary cap is pretty meaningless and dumb. I see people complaining about the concept of a billionaire, and I find that entirely silly - my buddy from high school was a billionaire (in that he bought a few billion Zimbabwe dollars in 2008) so obviously the thing that’s problematic is not having a bank balance with too many zeroes in and of itself.
Antitrust breakups on the other hand are necessary to the functioning of any capitalist market.
They should not be broken up just because they are big and big is bad or whatever.
In areas where these companies exert so much control over a particular industry or product that they are able to use anticompetitive practices to enrich themselves at the cost of the overall market’s efficiency, yes, they should be broken up.
When it threatens competition. Anything else is arbitrary and counterproductive.
A company with a small market share can do anticompetitive things that should be punished even though they are small. And a relatively big company can be relatively well behaved (especially if it’s heavily regulated) though above a certain market share you’re inherently anticompetitive.
But if there’s healthy competition going on, I agree with others that a corporation shouldn’t be prevented from being “too big” simply because they’re too big.
I tend to agree this is where the line should be drawn. A healthy economy needs free market competition. Any company that gets big enough to interfere with the working of a free market should be broken down into competing entities.
But I don’t see a need for a general limit on size.
Can anyone give me an example of a massive mega-conglomerate that isn’t engaging in anti-competitive behavior and that doesn’t have an unfair market advantage because of its scope?
I mean, my understanding is that the answer to “how on earth would we ever enforce this?” is that we used to enforce it just fine. There was a popular regulatory precedent in the US that the size of a corporation represented an inherent threat to the common good. This was before the tech cartels took over and achieved full regulatory capture. Now anti-trust laws are being weaponized by the cartels to crush the competition.
Which seems like a pretty strong reason to discourage businesses from getting too big.