 There is no economic argument for antitrust. There is no economic argument for the antitrust. Because in a free market, there's no such thing as a monopoly. Standard oil, even when it had 93%, it had some competitors who could potentially grow and take it over, and did indeed grow and take much market share from Standard Oil. It had foreign competitors. The 93% was just in the United States. This was a period of globalization in the 19th century, where there was free trade globally. And indeed, even when Rockefeller had 93%, nobody would question, and you can go and find the records. They exist. The prices went down every year, and quality went up every year. Alex Epstein, who wrote the book, Model Case for Foster Fuel, has an excellent article. You can look at Alex Epstein and JD Rockefeller online. There's an excellent article on JD Rockefeller that's worth reading. There's nothing damaging, harmful to whom that JD Rockefeller did. Now, did his competitors like him? No. But many of them were bought out by him and made a fortune by being bought out by him. Not all of them liked being bought out by him. Even though they got paid very well for it, they maybe would have preferred to run their own business. But they couldn't compete, and they sold because they knew they couldn't compete. This is what capitalism is about. It's about the successful geniuses going out there, buying competitors, buying other people, growing their business, and being as successful as they possibly can. That is their responsibility to themselves, to living the best life that they can live. And it's their responsibility to their shareholders, their investors. Yeah, Daniel reminds me that an excellent resource for all of this stuff is Bert Folsom's book, Folsom F-U-L-S-O-M, Myth of the Robber Barons. Anybody confused about the Robber Barons, about Rockefeller, about Carnegie, about these guys? Go read that book. There was zero reason to break up Standard Oil, US Steel, or any of the great businesses of the time. In a free market, for a while, it almost never lasts, companies gain dominant market positions. Part of the reason so many people want to compete with them is because a lot of people understand that when you gain a dominant market position, that's often a weakness, not a strength. It often does result in slowing down innovation, slowing down investment, getting a little lax, maybe prices go up, and competitors will swoon in as they always do. I mean, all the big antitrust cases against American businesses have always targeted businesses that were lowering prices. Alcoa was lowering prices of aluminum in the 50s and 60s when they went after them. IBM was lowering the price of computing, and of course had competition. The competition, that's the other thing. There's always competition. I've said this in my talks, talking about Rockefeller. Who competed Rockefeller out of his business? His business was selling kerosene. Who competed him out of the business of selling kerosene? Edison, Google doesn't innovate? Are you insane? Do you know how many billions and billions of dollars Google invests in things that you don't see? Google is a massive innovative engine and has labs on labs on labs. And if Google doesn't innovate, it'll die. What are you worried about? But since when? Since when do we believe that you replace the judgment of politicians over the judgment of the marketplace, over the judgment of consumers and producers? Since when do we believe that government is going to generate a better result at Google than Google does? Or that the market will? It is truly... I mean, one of the things they were doing with Google yesterday was trying to accuse Google, this was Republicans of course, trying to accuse Google of being unpatriotic because they turned down a certain government contract and yet they do stuff with the Chinese and the China stuff is a whole other issue. And yet Google has tons of government projects, military projects. They turned down one. There is no economic argument to justify antitrust. They cannot be a monopoly in a free market because there is always competition. A monopoly is something granted to you by the government and if the government cannot grant you anything, you have no monopoly. The original monopoly, the word comes from the monopoly given to the Anglo-Indian, I think it was the Anglo-Indian company to have a monopoly over India, over trade with India. It's a government monopoly. The government protected it. The government prohibited people from competing. In a free market there is no such thing. Rockefeller prices went down, quality went down and ultimately the market competed him down in terms of market share. I don't know of a market monopoly. Yeah, it was the East India Company. That was the first monopoly, I think. But I'm fine, bring on some examples. We'd love to see some examples of monopolies. I want to be clear here. The model is the practical. I'm going to get to the model in a minute. The practical is the model. There is no economic argument against monopolies. Never seen one, never read one. Cable companies? You're complaining because you have to pay more money? Why is that a monopoly? They charge you a lot of money to bring you 500 channels into your home. This is a bad thing. By the way, cable companies are government monopolies. Cable companies, every city allocates a certain number of charters to a specific company, to one or two companies that serve a particular region. There's no competition because the government won't allow it. So monopolies are government granted. If they're not government granted, they're not monopolies. And of course, look what happened because cable companies raised the prices. So even with a little bit of free markets that we have today in the world, a little bit, and government control and government granting special flavors to cable companies, look what happened. First, you got dish and direct TV. That's competition. It's great competition, direct TV for years. Really good competition. Then there was further innovation. Once internet got fast enough, you now have what? Or you now can cut the cord completely. Now all you need is an internet. Now you have apps, you have Apple TV, you have Roku, you have all these other devices that replace the cable box. Remember cable boxes? And you might say, oh, but I have to buy the internet. Isn't my internet provider monopoly really? There are multiple internet providers in every market. And again, if the government allowed for actual competition, there would be more or maybe less. I don't know, but we don't know because there's no market. You can actually get satellite internet. You can get internet from your cable company, you can get wireless internet, you can get satellite internet. The whole thing is bizarre. So I'll repeat it again. I'm open to being challenged with particular examples, but I've never seen it. There's no such thing as a monopoly. In a free market. Free market. In a free market. We don't have a free market today. Public utilities, monopolies, yeah. Because the government granted them that monopoly. If we had had a free market in delivering electricity, water, sewage, and other things to a home, who knows how those markets would have evolved. But we don't. We don't. What we have is a government grant and monopoly. Exactly my point. In a free market. Free market means no government intervention. There's no such thing as a monopoly. And there is no economic theory that's legitimate. They would argue that having a large market share is problematic. They just isn't. And indeed, reality shows that. That all these companies with large market shares actually provide us amazing products for really, really, really low prices. Chad is asking a $20 question on topic. I love this. Amazon and Apple were attacked for their third-party platforms. Both built a first-party platform, then enabled third parties to benefit. If they killed their third-party platforms, would Congress be happy and go away? No, of course not. Of course not. Because the whole point is that it's not about the particular platform. It's about the particular way in which it's done. It's the fact that they're so successful, so wealthy, so innovative, in many ways so beloved, and so dominant. I mean, Apple and Amazon are dominant market players. Not because they have dominant market share, but because they dictate, because everybody looks up to them. They are at the forefront of everything. Nobody looks up to these politicians. They're all left out. So they're always going to be challenges. You can't win by shifting your design, by changing your practices. Oh, we were going to have to... All of that is going to be later. I said, answering questions on topic, if it's not on topic, it's going to have to go later, even though it's almost a $20 question, like you skipped by one cent. So there is no economic argument. What about moral argument? Political argument. Give us none. All anti-just laws are laws driven by envy, laws driven by a desire to penalize success, to penalize ability, to bring those bastards down a little bit. Who are they to guide the future of technology? We are politicians. It's our job to do that. Who are they to be so admired and so rich and so successful and so respected? We're politicians. We're supposed to... We get the statues. They don't get the statues. We get named... Streets named after us. We're the good guys, not them. And how dare... How dare they be so self-interested? So selfish. How dare they focus on profits? How dare they focus on their own vision and don't ask us what we want? And it's not just politicians. These are wild-held views among an American public. How dare Facebook make its own decisions without consulting us? How dare any of these platforms do whatever they want to do and succeed when we can't even build an Obama-ke exchange? Remember how it crashed? How awful it was as a piece of software? Driven by sheer envy, hatred of success, and hatred of self-interest. Hatred of businessmen is deeply ingrained, unfortunately, in this country of businessmen. We have definitely a love-hate relationship. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist brought. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now. 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, I want to see a thumbs up. There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. And if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. Let's see if you can help get the show promoted. 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