Unsurprising
Did Amazon think they were too big to convict?
I wonder if they will meet the fate of Standard Oil, back in the day.
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No, Antitrust law was effectively neutered by the Chicago School and their agent Robert Bork.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...
(BTW that source is right-wing and can hardly be said to be biased against Bork).
That's fascinating. Bork was denied being on the supreme court but his ideas shaped current antitrust laws. It feels a bit like the old Standard Oil argument: It's ok to have a huge market share so long as pricing for goods gets cheaper even if it hurts competition overall. *edited* for grammar.
Yeah. Heather Cox Richardson was arguing about this today, saying that historically the job of the government was to decide that cheaper but gutting a local economy, or cheaper but taking enough market share to be able to heavily raise prices in the future was bad. But due to Bork that capacity of the government to actually help drive good outcomes for the bulk of the population has been gutted.
local small business should offer local specialty, if it's doing the exact same thing as the big business but with higher overhead, then why not find something much more productive for the folks there?
small local economies that are stagnating already for decades are not great for anyone. people who live there are struggling, no upward mobility, anyone a bit more successful leaves, the usual urban rural polarization intensifies, yadda yadda.
obviously one of the big drivers of this is the completely fucked up housing policy. (which itself is driven by public safety and public transit issues.)
education is a close second. then the return to office mandates. the all the discontinuities and disincentives of the braindead wrong implementation of welfare (and other social support/payments).
the real economy deadweight loss is easily 2-3% of GDP (per year of course)
Remember, Bork was the third guy who supinely did Nixon's bidding when Attornet-General and his deputy resigned rather than fire the special prosecutor investigating Watergate.