8 ms·

Deregulation never seems to result in more competition, just more consolidation and more and more powerful companies with increased lobbying powers and personal

by mevile 7y ago

Deregulation never seems to result in more competition, just more consolidation and more and more powerful companies with increased lobbying powers and personal connections to top government officials.

std_throwaway 7y ago
Is it really getting any worse or has it always been this way and we just don't learn it in history class?
- jliptzin 7y ago
  The causes are the same, the effects accumulate over time
- tehjoker 7y ago
  Some things are better many important things are worse. Consumer goods are doing well, and are high quality where regulations are intact, the good can be trivially inspected on purchase, or reputation provides enough of a backstop to prevent quality decreases. That's the upside of capitalism. On the downside, many people are underemployed even in a so-called tight labor market, fewer and fewer people own anything like a house or car and are highly indebted. Few people have any savings whatsoever and the administration in conjunction with the monied classes seeks to strip whatever protections remain while scapegoating immigrants. Additionally, the US and the west appear to be better off than they are because we use the power of our military, monetary system, and relationships to make sure items are produced cheaply overseas with negligible labor protections resulting in abusive labor conditions. Also, the planet is dying due to unlimited resource extraction.
  - breatheoften 7y ago
    The depressing truth ... how do you deal with it? I’ve been going through depression cycles — sometimes I can ignore the depressing nature that comes from holding an inherently non-positive expectation for the future as basically my best attempt to rationally assess the present and predict the future from it — ignorance is bliss? - but sometimes I embrace that most rational perspective as the “most likely source of truth” and promptly get incredibly (deeply) depressed ... to the point where i can feel myself faking “normal” interpersonal interactions and struggling against the fact that most or all locally true reasons for a hopeful outlook basically pale in comparison to the macroscopic reasons to be non-hopeful ... It’s deeply sad to know that future generations won’t have as much opportunity as I had to enjoy life ... but to pity them will feel patronizing to them - and so what is left for them to know of me and me to know of them ...? Dear citizens of the future, know that some of us are sorry for how your life will go — and know that some of us are not for they got theirs before you arrived and that was enough for them ... for some of us this wasn’t enough - we lived your pain in our imaginations while enjoying a physical life of abundance that, in the end, has helped you in no way at all ...
    - tehjoker 7y ago
      If it helps, the next IPCC report will include a section on mental health... :( This study might be related: "Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change" https://www.pnas.org/content/115/43/10953 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/43/10953
- entropea 7y ago
  Consumer goods is great, things nobody really truly needs except to satisfy a missing dopamine hit from no longer really being engaged in society, nature, and life, only living an image, an appearance, existing only as a commodity. Just about everything else is worse though. Wages stay the same while costs rise, markets continue to monopolize and we get fewer choices.
Camas 7y ago
Plenty of counter-examples. Domestic US flights vs European ones for one.
jgeada 7y ago
Well, that is exactly to be expected and is exactly what is predicted by economic theory: Markets only actually function under regulation, unregulated markets lead to monopolies or monopsonies.
- ptaipale 7y ago
  This may be true in US aviation industry (regulation is too weak) but certainly not applicable for supporting a blanket statement like "Deregulation never seems to result in more competition" above. Deregulation is often a key to more competition. The change in telecom industry in Western countries between approximately 1985 and now is a great example. The evolution of Internet and mobile communications could not have happened with the regulatory framework, institutions and practices of 1985. There can be too little regulation. There can be too much regulation. There can be wrong kind of regulation.
  - rectang 7y ago
    > There can be too little regulation. There can be too much regulation. There can be wrong kind of regulation. Fully agreed. All markets are constructed, all markets are regulated — even if only by the existence of a court system for resolving disputes. But it is a difficult task to craft minimal regulation which fosters enduring competition and forestalls the natural tendency of markets towards monopoly, monopsony, and other varieties of market failure.
- icelancer 7y ago
  This is not what "economic theory" predicts... which also doesn't mean much. Which school of economic theory are you referencing?
rayiner 7y ago
I mean this is facially untrue. We’ve been undergoing a 70-year long period of deregulation, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive. (Not to mention, it’s been copied by nearly every Western European country, and has markedly improved what during the 1970s and 1980s were very weak economies.) We can get next day packages from Amazon, for example, because of the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries: https://parcelindustry.com/article-5131-De-Regulation-of-the-Airline-Industry-FedEx-and-Last-Mile-Delivery.html https://parcelindustry.com/article-5131-De-Regulation-of-the.... Previously, package delivery would take much long because packages would be transferred from carrier to carrier operating on regulated routes with regulated prices. In the electric industry, deregulation of the generator side of the industry has caused wholesale electricity prices to plummet. Today, more than half the cost of electricity is from the still-regulated, retail distribution side. As to airline deregulation: fatality rates per million passenger miles has trended linearly down since the 1960s. So have ticket prices. https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-to-fly-during-the-golden-age-of-travel https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-.... We have also largely avoided regulation of the first major post-FDR industry: the Internet. If the US operated the way it did in the 1950s and 1960s, we’d likely have regulated prices per ad impression and things like that. Instead, the industry has flourished in the absence of regulation. There is a reason anti-deregulation screeds focus on isolated incidents and are heavy on narrative. Why are we fixating in one instance of failure instead of looking at what airline safety records have looked like over the past decades overall? Objective views of numbers and long term trends make the situation look far more rosey.
- ivraatiems 7y ago
  I don't find the evidence you provide to back up your claim compelling. Nothing that you say suggests that deregulation is the reason for economic improvement, rather than other things that have also happened over the last several decades, such as the rise of superior technology, the end of the Cold War, or the invention of New Coke. The first article you cite, about delivery companies, is from an industry publication. Naturally, they're going to advocate things they view as beneficial to the industry. Your claim that deregulation is the cause of electricity prices plummeting, and that the regulated side produces more cost, are wholly unsubstantiated. Even if there was substantiation of the trend, that doesn't mean one caused the other. Likewise, according to the article you cite, there's now _more_ regulation in some areas of the airline industry, like security. Maybe _that's_ why fatalities have decreased. (I don't actually believe that, but it's equally plausible.) Objective views of numbers and long-term trends are meaningless in the absence of an effort to understand the causal relationships. Correlation does not imply causation. Compelling evidence that deregulation provides economic benefit requires an evidence-backed explanation of _how_ it has done so. Edited to address your edit re: the Internet as an industry: Again, it's the same issue. You don't present any evidence that the Internet being unregulated is the reason it's successful - or even a contributor. And the scenario you propose about ad regulation isn't anything like the kinds of actual regulations that have been proposed, like net neutrality.
wingspar 7y ago
Pre deregulation, the US government set the routes and prices, and even if an airline could exist. Eg. Southwest Airlines was forbidden to fly outside Texas. Prices were way higher and flight routes restricted. Very different today... Affordability and availability way up, overall enjoyment... that’s up to the traveler... https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-of-flight-costs https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-o... https://m.aviationweek.com/blog/law-changed-airline-industry-beyond-recognition-1978 https://m.aviationweek.com/blog/law-changed-airline-industry... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-airline-ticket-prices-fell-50-in-30-years-and-why-nobody-noticed/273506/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  Southwest couldn’t fly outside of Texas because they chose to use Love field as their base. Love was cheap for them to get into because flights from there had already been restricted in an attempt to shift commercial flights to the fledgling D/FW international airport. Two airports in Fort Worth were similarly restricted and shifted entirely to general aviation. Southwest back then was a very different airline vs. today; they acted more like a bus service between the major Texas cities than an airline- cheap fares, departures every 20 minutes to each destination, tickets generally available on extremely short notice without a markup. They had to change their operating model significantly after 9/11 because of the new security measures. For example, They were exclusively using at-gate checkin, with reusable boarding cards that you gave back when you got on the plane. That’s the origin of their first to checkin is first to board system; it originally reflected the order people physically arrived at the gate. And with the frequent departures, the first boarding card generally went to someone who had just missed the previous plane; there was no upcharge or hassle for getting on an earlier plane than you had a ticket for, so long as there were seats available.
  - kgermino 7y ago
    You have the order wrong. Southwest was founded before deregulation and planned to fly exclusively intra-Texas routes to avoid federal route & fare planning. Obviously they also saw a market for the shuttle service they were running. Separately, as part of the plan to build DFW all operating airlines at Dallas and Ft Worth signed agreements to move all service to the new airport once it opened. Key word: operating, Southwest wasn’t flying yet when the agreement was signed. Between the agreement and DFWs opening Southwest started flying their shuttle service. Knowing that wouldn’t work from DFW, and since they hadn’t signed the agreement to leave, they planned to stay at Dallas-Love. This sparked a bunch of lawsuits and other fights but the end result was the Wright Amendment which heavily restricted flights from Dallas-Love. The restrictions were a response to Southwest, not an initial factor in their plan. They were also another form of regulatory capture, since the incumbent airlines used their connections in the federal government to get a law passed restricting their competition.
cmurf 7y ago
If deregulation were to remove barriers to market entry for small competitors, it could. But big businesses are among the first to demand regulations: a. so they can say they were fully compliant, as a kind of certification and absolution by their sovereign; and b. so they can erect barriers to competitors. The vast majority of law and regulations in the U.S. are written by industry trade groups, lobbyists. A huge part of the media depends on the massive advertising component of lobbying, both direct and what lawmakers end up spending to reach constituents. We're way past time to take this seriously, but alas most conservatives had exactly zero problem with Citizens United, actively arguing in favor of the idea that corporations are persons, that money is speech, and corporations have free speech too and therefore can spend essentially unlimited money in the political system via advertising their positions totally disproportionately to the intent behind individual free speech. What we have now is an aristocratic concept, more money more speech. More money, more say. More money, wider broadcast of opinions and propaganda. Individuals should be having these conversations and debates using critical thinking rather than inundated with corporate talking points delivered into our lives via devices that we pay for. I think a company can issue unlimited press releases saying whatever the company wants to say. But the amount of money they get to spend on political, policy, and perhaps even social advertising, should be limited.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > I think a company can issue unlimited press releases saying whatever the company wants to say. But the amount of money they get to spend on political, policy, and perhaps even social advertising, should be limited. The foundational problem is this. Media companies like CNN and The Wall St Journal are corporations and their business is talking about politics. What does it even mean, then, to restrict how much money they can spend on it? How do you even measure the value of being able to choose which anchor with which viewpoints gets which timeslot, or which story goes on the front page? Or being able to just not report on stories (like media consolidation) that they're not interested in people knowing about? But if buying a TV network to get airtime for your viewpoint is speech then so is buying airtime from that TV network. The solution to this isn't to restrict corporations from saying things. It's to make sure that everybody else gets to say things too. So that's things like public financing of elections, and decentralized social networks (in the style of email) so that nobody gets to gatekeep information. Make it cheaper to reach voters without corporate sponsorship and you erode the corrosive utility in corporate sponsorship. Making it more difficult only does the opposite and makes it worse -- nobody wants Zuckerberg to have the power to determine the President with an algorithm.
AdrianB1 7y ago
This does not look like deregulation, but corruption: having FAA regulate, but delegate to Boeing to "self-control". Like building prisons and asking convicts to guard themselves. I think I saw similar stories about FCC, but with no people dead as a result.
coldtea 7y ago
>Deregulation never seems to result in more competition Deregulation won't result in more competition when there are big players that can use their money for advertisement, consolidation, buying smaller competitors, cartels, and so on. What can result in more competition is regulation that favors competition. Breaking up behemoths after a certain size (a la AT & T) is one good way...
dmix 7y ago
When has the US gov ever moved away from the pseudo market of mega firms anointed to succeed like Boeing in the last few decades? After the financial crisis the regulations added only further excluded small firms from the banking market because they had ridiculous rules meant for mega banks applied to all banks. So why wouldn’t all the small banks just sell their firms to the big ones? “Too small to exist” is the reality, not simply “too big to fail” (aka too well connected to fail). Now we only have 5 mega banks further entrenched. Aircraft manufacturer market is even more limited (the incident with Canada’s Bombardier vs US Boeing showed everything you need to know about that ‘private’ market). I’m not sure what fantasy world people live in when they talk about deregulation of these markets as a common phenomenon, especially airlines, finance, health care, telephony etc (all of the worst industries for consumers in the US, which I should note has nothing to do with the value of public gov run markets which these are not). Absolutely none of those have less administrative oversight than a few decades ago. I guess they listen to politicians instead of any indicators from the market place or history. If the ‘deregulations’ all further entrench the massive companies, while leaving all of the barriers to entry for the small firms. What outcome did you expect? More competition between the 3-4 mega companies that remain? Is that how we were supposed to benefit from competition?
CamperBob2 7y ago
How familiar are you with the pre- and post-deregulation eras in the airline industry?

by mevile 7y ago

std_throwaway 7y ago

Is it really getting any worse or has it always been this way and we just don't learn it in history class?

jliptzin 7y ago
The causes are the same, the effects accumulate over time
tehjoker 7y ago
Some things are better many important things are worse. Consumer goods are doing well, and are high quality where regulations are intact, the good can be trivially inspected on purchase, or reputation provides enough of a backstop to prevent quality decreases. That's the upside of capitalism. On the downside, many people are underemployed even in a so-called tight labor market, fewer and fewer people own anything like a house or car and are highly indebted. Few people have any savings whatsoever and the administration in conjunction with the monied classes seeks to strip whatever protections remain while scapegoating immigrants. Additionally, the US and the west appear to be better off than they are because we use the power of our military, monetary system, and relationships to make sure items are produced cheaply overseas with negligible labor protections resulting in abusive labor conditions. Also, the planet is dying due to unlimited resource extraction.
- breatheoften 7y ago
  The depressing truth ... how do you deal with it? I’ve been going through depression cycles — sometimes I can ignore the depressing nature that comes from holding an inherently non-positive expectation for the future as basically my best attempt to rationally assess the present and predict the future from it — ignorance is bliss? - but sometimes I embrace that most rational perspective as the “most likely source of truth” and promptly get incredibly (deeply) depressed ... to the point where i can feel myself faking “normal” interpersonal interactions and struggling against the fact that most or all locally true reasons for a hopeful outlook basically pale in comparison to the macroscopic reasons to be non-hopeful ... It’s deeply sad to know that future generations won’t have as much opportunity as I had to enjoy life ... but to pity them will feel patronizing to them - and so what is left for them to know of me and me to know of them ...? Dear citizens of the future, know that some of us are sorry for how your life will go — and know that some of us are not for they got theirs before you arrived and that was enough for them ... for some of us this wasn’t enough - we lived your pain in our imaginations while enjoying a physical life of abundance that, in the end, has helped you in no way at all ...
  - tehjoker 7y ago
    If it helps, the next IPCC report will include a section on mental health... :( This study might be related: "Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change" https://www.pnas.org/content/115/43/10953 https://www.pnas.org/content/115/43/10953
entropea 7y ago
Consumer goods is great, things nobody really truly needs except to satisfy a missing dopamine hit from no longer really being engaged in society, nature, and life, only living an image, an appearance, existing only as a commodity. Just about everything else is worse though. Wages stay the same while costs rise, markets continue to monopolize and we get fewer choices.

Camas 7y ago

Plenty of counter-examples. Domestic US flights vs European ones for one.

jgeada 7y ago

Well, that is exactly to be expected and is exactly what is predicted by economic theory: Markets only actually function under regulation, unregulated markets lead to monopolies or monopsonies.

ptaipale 7y ago
This may be true in US aviation industry (regulation is too weak) but certainly not applicable for supporting a blanket statement like "Deregulation never seems to result in more competition" above. Deregulation is often a key to more competition. The change in telecom industry in Western countries between approximately 1985 and now is a great example. The evolution of Internet and mobile communications could not have happened with the regulatory framework, institutions and practices of 1985. There can be too little regulation. There can be too much regulation. There can be wrong kind of regulation.
- rectang 7y ago
  > There can be too little regulation. There can be too much regulation. There can be wrong kind of regulation. Fully agreed. All markets are constructed, all markets are regulated — even if only by the existence of a court system for resolving disputes. But it is a difficult task to craft minimal regulation which fosters enduring competition and forestalls the natural tendency of markets towards monopoly, monopsony, and other varieties of market failure.
icelancer 7y ago
This is not what "economic theory" predicts... which also doesn't mean much. Which school of economic theory are you referencing?

rayiner 7y ago

I mean this is facially untrue. We’ve been undergoing a 70-year long period of deregulation, and it’s been overwhelmingly positive. (Not to mention, it’s been copied by nearly every Western European country, and has markedly improved what during the 1970s and 1980s were very weak economies.) We can get next day packages from Amazon, for example, because of the deregulation of the airline and trucking industries: https://parcelindustry.com/article-5131-De-Regulation-of-the-Airline-Industry-FedEx-and-Last-Mile-Delivery.html https://parcelindustry.com/article-5131-De-Regulation-of-the.... Previously, package delivery would take much long because packages would be transferred from carrier to carrier operating on regulated routes with regulated prices. In the electric industry, deregulation of the generator side of the industry has caused wholesale electricity prices to plummet. Today, more than half the cost of electricity is from the still-regulated, retail distribution side. As to airline deregulation: fatality rates per million passenger miles has trended linearly down since the 1960s. So have ticket prices. https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-to-fly-during-the-golden-age-of-travel https://www.fastcompany.com/3022215/what-it-was-really-like-.... We have also largely avoided regulation of the first major post-FDR industry: the Internet. If the US operated the way it did in the 1950s and 1960s, we’d likely have regulated prices per ad impression and things like that. Instead, the industry has flourished in the absence of regulation. There is a reason anti-deregulation screeds focus on isolated incidents and are heavy on narrative. Why are we fixating in one instance of failure instead of looking at what airline safety records have looked like over the past decades overall? Objective views of numbers and long term trends make the situation look far more rosey.

ivraatiems 7y ago
I don't find the evidence you provide to back up your claim compelling. Nothing that you say suggests that deregulation is the reason for economic improvement, rather than other things that have also happened over the last several decades, such as the rise of superior technology, the end of the Cold War, or the invention of New Coke. The first article you cite, about delivery companies, is from an industry publication. Naturally, they're going to advocate things they view as beneficial to the industry. Your claim that deregulation is the cause of electricity prices plummeting, and that the regulated side produces more cost, are wholly unsubstantiated. Even if there was substantiation of the trend, that doesn't mean one caused the other. Likewise, according to the article you cite, there's now _more_ regulation in some areas of the airline industry, like security. Maybe _that's_ why fatalities have decreased. (I don't actually believe that, but it's equally plausible.) Objective views of numbers and long-term trends are meaningless in the absence of an effort to understand the causal relationships. Correlation does not imply causation. Compelling evidence that deregulation provides economic benefit requires an evidence-backed explanation of _how_ it has done so. Edited to address your edit re: the Internet as an industry: Again, it's the same issue. You don't present any evidence that the Internet being unregulated is the reason it's successful - or even a contributor. And the scenario you propose about ad regulation isn't anything like the kinds of actual regulations that have been proposed, like net neutrality.

wingspar 7y ago

Pre deregulation, the US government set the routes and prices, and even if an airline could exist. Eg. Southwest Airlines was forbidden to fly outside Texas. Prices were way higher and flight routes restricted. Very different today... Affordability and availability way up, overall enjoyment... that’s up to the traveler... https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-of-flight-costs https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-o... https://m.aviationweek.com/blog/law-changed-airline-industry-beyond-recognition-1978 https://m.aviationweek.com/blog/law-changed-airline-industry... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-airline-ticket-prices-fell-50-in-30-years-and-why-nobody-noticed/273506/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...

kd5bjo 7y ago
Southwest couldn’t fly outside of Texas because they chose to use Love field as their base. Love was cheap for them to get into because flights from there had already been restricted in an attempt to shift commercial flights to the fledgling D/FW international airport. Two airports in Fort Worth were similarly restricted and shifted entirely to general aviation. Southwest back then was a very different airline vs. today; they acted more like a bus service between the major Texas cities than an airline- cheap fares, departures every 20 minutes to each destination, tickets generally available on extremely short notice without a markup. They had to change their operating model significantly after 9/11 because of the new security measures. For example, They were exclusively using at-gate checkin, with reusable boarding cards that you gave back when you got on the plane. That’s the origin of their first to checkin is first to board system; it originally reflected the order people physically arrived at the gate. And with the frequent departures, the first boarding card generally went to someone who had just missed the previous plane; there was no upcharge or hassle for getting on an earlier plane than you had a ticket for, so long as there were seats available.
- kgermino 7y ago
  You have the order wrong. Southwest was founded before deregulation and planned to fly exclusively intra-Texas routes to avoid federal route & fare planning. Obviously they also saw a market for the shuttle service they were running. Separately, as part of the plan to build DFW all operating airlines at Dallas and Ft Worth signed agreements to move all service to the new airport once it opened. Key word: operating, Southwest wasn’t flying yet when the agreement was signed. Between the agreement and DFWs opening Southwest started flying their shuttle service. Knowing that wouldn’t work from DFW, and since they hadn’t signed the agreement to leave, they planned to stay at Dallas-Love. This sparked a bunch of lawsuits and other fights but the end result was the Wright Amendment which heavily restricted flights from Dallas-Love. The restrictions were a response to Southwest, not an initial factor in their plan. They were also another form of regulatory capture, since the incumbent airlines used their connections in the federal government to get a law passed restricting their competition.

cmurf 7y ago

If deregulation were to remove barriers to market entry for small competitors, it could. But big businesses are among the first to demand regulations: a. so they can say they were fully compliant, as a kind of certification and absolution by their sovereign; and b. so they can erect barriers to competitors. The vast majority of law and regulations in the U.S. are written by industry trade groups, lobbyists. A huge part of the media depends on the massive advertising component of lobbying, both direct and what lawmakers end up spending to reach constituents. We're way past time to take this seriously, but alas most conservatives had exactly zero problem with Citizens United, actively arguing in favor of the idea that corporations are persons, that money is speech, and corporations have free speech too and therefore can spend essentially unlimited money in the political system via advertising their positions totally disproportionately to the intent behind individual free speech. What we have now is an aristocratic concept, more money more speech. More money, more say. More money, wider broadcast of opinions and propaganda. Individuals should be having these conversations and debates using critical thinking rather than inundated with corporate talking points delivered into our lives via devices that we pay for. I think a company can issue unlimited press releases saying whatever the company wants to say. But the amount of money they get to spend on political, policy, and perhaps even social advertising, should be limited.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> I think a company can issue unlimited press releases saying whatever the company wants to say. But the amount of money they get to spend on political, policy, and perhaps even social advertising, should be limited. The foundational problem is this. Media companies like CNN and The Wall St Journal are corporations and their business is talking about politics. What does it even mean, then, to restrict how much money they can spend on it? How do you even measure the value of being able to choose which anchor with which viewpoints gets which timeslot, or which story goes on the front page? Or being able to just not report on stories (like media consolidation) that they're not interested in people knowing about? But if buying a TV network to get airtime for your viewpoint is speech then so is buying airtime from that TV network. The solution to this isn't to restrict corporations from saying things. It's to make sure that everybody else gets to say things too. So that's things like public financing of elections, and decentralized social networks (in the style of email) so that nobody gets to gatekeep information. Make it cheaper to reach voters without corporate sponsorship and you erode the corrosive utility in corporate sponsorship. Making it more difficult only does the opposite and makes it worse -- nobody wants Zuckerberg to have the power to determine the President with an algorithm.

AdrianB1 7y ago

This does not look like deregulation, but corruption: having FAA regulate, but delegate to Boeing to "self-control". Like building prisons and asking convicts to guard themselves. I think I saw similar stories about FCC, but with no people dead as a result.

coldtea 7y ago

>Deregulation never seems to result in more competition Deregulation won't result in more competition when there are big players that can use their money for advertisement, consolidation, buying smaller competitors, cartels, and so on. What can result in more competition is regulation that favors competition. Breaking up behemoths after a certain size (a la AT & T) is one good way...

dmix 7y ago

When has the US gov ever moved away from the pseudo market of mega firms anointed to succeed like Boeing in the last few decades? After the financial crisis the regulations added only further excluded small firms from the banking market because they had ridiculous rules meant for mega banks applied to all banks. So why wouldn’t all the small banks just sell their firms to the big ones? “Too small to exist” is the reality, not simply “too big to fail” (aka too well connected to fail). Now we only have 5 mega banks further entrenched. Aircraft manufacturer market is even more limited (the incident with Canada’s Bombardier vs US Boeing showed everything you need to know about that ‘private’ market). I’m not sure what fantasy world people live in when they talk about deregulation of these markets as a common phenomenon, especially airlines, finance, health care, telephony etc (all of the worst industries for consumers in the US, which I should note has nothing to do with the value of public gov run markets which these are not). Absolutely none of those have less administrative oversight than a few decades ago. I guess they listen to politicians instead of any indicators from the market place or history. If the ‘deregulations’ all further entrench the massive companies, while leaving all of the barriers to entry for the small firms. What outcome did you expect? More competition between the 3-4 mega companies that remain? Is that how we were supposed to benefit from competition?

CamperBob2 7y ago

How familiar are you with the pre- and post-deregulation eras in the airline industry?