
Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies - avyfain
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/04/20/want-to-rescue-rural-america-bust-monopolies/
======
cs702
_" I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of
Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to
eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks.
The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public
health officials, a major grant from the National Institutes of Health and
robust private investment. But when my partners and I tried to sell it to
hospitals, we were told time and time again that even though it was a better
product — a lifesaving product — they weren’t able to purchase it. The primary
supplier of syringes, which controlled 80 percent of the market, structured an
arrangement with a vast network of hospitals that essentially closed our
industry to new firms for good."_

A market in which buyers are not free to choose better products is not a free
market.

A market in which new entrants cannot compete _fairly_ against established
players is not a free market.

A market in which innovators have to get permission and pay established
players for "access" (think ISPs) is not a free market.

And yes, a market in which economic and political power is concentrated in
large corporations geographically clustered in a handful of giant metropolitan
areas... is also not a free market.

Those corporations have both strong incentives and the means to change the
rules of competition to their advantage.

~~~
skummetmaelk
That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks
like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this
behaviour.

People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by
orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free
in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically
"free" and horrible.

~~~
Qwertious
'People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by
orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free
in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically
"free" and horrible.'

Don't call it the free market. Call it what it is: COMPETITION.

"Free market" implies "I can do what I want", but frankly we don't WANT people
to be free to pull anti-competitive shenanigans. Competition is the priority,
not "the free market".

~~~
ericHosick
> "Free market" implies "I can do what I want"

I always though free implied free from non-consensual acts. It's not much of a
free market if your actions are non-consensual (1).

(1) Defining what makes an action consensual is difficult but doable.

~~~
jaredklewis
Difficult indeed.

An ordinary American internet user consents to countless pages of legalese in
adhesion and other unread contracts (TOSs, privacy policies and so on)
everyday day. These days, every website, piece of software, digital service or
product comes with pages upon pages of contracts to which the user must
consent to even walk in the door. Reading all of them is easily a full time
job.

So, no one has coerced anyone into anything, just a bunch of consenting
parties in theory.

In practice, getting consumers to throw away their rights and consent to
stridently anti-competitive behavior by companies seems kind of easy.

Taken in the sense of an economy of mutual consent, "free market" is too low a
bar to hop over. I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of
"free market" is very free.

~~~
ericHosick
This is a deep discussion to have: too deep for a medium like HN. That being
said...

Your points pre-suppose parties consented to a dispute resolution system: one
that is based on arbitrary boundaries and quite monopolistic (1).

> I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market"
> is very free.

So, I agree that it is hard for people to understand what consent is when they
were never given a chance to choose which dispute resolution system(s) they
can participate in.

(1) Example being I was born in the USA so somehow automatically consented to
the rules of the land.

~~~
jaredklewis
What you say is true much of the time, but it is also true that consumers
often do "choose" their arbiter. The aforementioned adhesion contracts often
stipulate a private (non-government) arbiter, which the consumer (probably
you, too) consents to of their own free will.

I see your points. But I kind of feel like we were having a rather nuts and
bolts discussion about how to improve security in Linux, and then someone
chimes in that we should probably rewrite everything in Haskell.

If achieving a free market requires a complete upheaval of all of our
governments and laws, then the idea isn't very useful.

~~~
ericHosick
> If achieving a free market requires a complete upheaval of all of our
> governments and laws, then the idea isn't very useful.

The idea is __extremely __useful: act consensual to others. There is no better
basis of a social system than this. Having conversations like the one were
having now is really all we need. To force the ideas on others in anyway,
especially through democracy, would be hypocritical.

A social system based on utility, which is basically all social systems we've
had throughout history, is violent, aggressive and dangerous. No wonder
history repeats itself.

~~~
kazagistar
The existence of property is based on a non-consensual model for the purpose
of utility.

~~~
sbov
Which is forced upon others through threat of violence. And was obtained via
violence in the first place.

------
tanderson92
Highly relevant: Matt Stoller in The Atlantic:

"How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul In the 1970s, a new wave of post-
Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an
increasingly dangerous political system."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-
dem...](https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-
killed-their-populist-soul/504710/)

~~~
jessaustin
This really opened my eye: a long time ago, there was actually a meaningful
difference between voting D and voting R. I can't really imagine voting in
such a context, but it sounds nice...

~~~
aaronbrethorst
How can you call LGBT rights, women's rights, police consent decrees,
environmental issues, and health care, just off the top of my head,
meaningless?

~~~
jessaustin
Ds talk a better game, but they rarely walk that talk. Take just your first
example. W's _first year_ in office, he wanted to standardize "civil unions"
that would have entailed all the same rights as "traditional marriages". Of
course, lots of "conservatives" were against that, so W reached across the
aisle. Crickets. Ds decided they wanted to preserve that issue's political
value, so it was more than a decade before gay and lesbian couples in
conservative states had access to these rights.

~~~
mozumder
What's your point in your false equivalency?

Are you implying that the 20 million people that now have medical coverage
because of Democrats pushing for Obamacare isn't worth it? Was that all
"talk"?

I'm seriously trying to understand your "equivalency" position.

Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? Right now it
seems that the only thing they've done is to actually limit universal health
care, so we have less than 100% coverage.

Are the two parties the same on health care?

Right now I don't trust anybody that says the two parties are the same, since
they are clearly very, very different. In fact, it seems the only people that
say that are Republicans that don't have a better argument?

Are you a Republican? Or maybe you fall under the auspices of a white-male
demographic that bias towards conservatism?

~~~
pdkl95
> Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care?

"Obamacare" (formerly known as "Romneycare") _is_ a republican healthcare
plan. One of the big reasons we claim that our two major parties are
approximately equivalent is the Democrats' habit of passing Republican
policies.

> since they are clearly very, very different

There are differences between R & D that are significant, but they are minor
compared to all the ways they are the same. You can be 100% sure that
politicians will side with their establishment, monied donors.

> Are the two parties the same on health care?

No, but they're both _bad_. Yes, Republicans are not going to improve
healthcare, but _neither are the Democrats_. Did you know Feinstein said a few
days ago in a town hall that she has no intention to support single-payer?

> it seems the only people that say that are Republicans

Assuming things like that only makes you sound partisan or uninformed. I'm not
a Republican, so now you have a counterexample.

~~~
stinkytaco
> No, but they're both bad. Yes, Republicans are not going to improve
> healthcare, but neither are the Democrats. Did you know Feinstein said a few
> days ago in a town hall that she has no intention to support single-payer?

I don't know Feinstein's motivations, nor am I knowledgeable about the
internal politics of the Democratic Party, but do you think her rejection of
single payer has more to do with politics than with actual belief? The "public
option" was realistically the closest America ever came to a single payer
system, and that proposal was largely sunk by Republicans in Congress, though
some Democrats in right-leaning states also rejected it. Are Democrats just
trying to compromise in a right-leaning political climate, or are they truly
the same?

------
peacetreefrog
Her two examples, the medical and agriculture sectors, are two of the most
regulated industries around.

A lot of these "monopolies" result because of regulation pushed by combination
of well-meaning and self interested people and corporations (see bootleggers
and baptists).

Her examples suggest it'd be better to focus on the marriage between
corporations and government, which allows companies to focus their energy on
getting gov to hassle their competitors vs improving their own product.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists)

~~~
lawrencewu
I don't know why you are getting downvoted because you're absolutely right.
The first three markets named (airlines, telecommunications, health care) are
all heavily regulated and the barrier to entries are controlled by the
government, not natural market forces.

Monopolies are not all bad. Sometimes a company has a monopoly because they
just offer a better product (Amazon, Google) and they shouldn't be punished
for that, especially when there's no government intervention that exists to
protect them.

~~~
backtoyoujim
Amazon is a infested with scam storefronts. And Amazon is really compelled to
do anything about it because they have no competition.

Airlines have huge market barriers: getting and maintaining huge, expensive,
gas guzzling aircraft. That is not a regulation barrier.

Both telecomm and health care are intwined monopsonies backing the play of
regional monopolies (cartels) backing federal congresspeople.

I just don't buy any of your comment as fact at all.

~~~
valuearb
Airlines have new entrants all the time. Sure it's costly to start a new
airline, but not by the standards of available capital. But there are also
lots of regulatory barriers, available landing slots and terminals for
example. For some reasons we think it necessary to have government run
airports.

Amazon has to compete with other online retailers and local retailers. How
many scams it allows is a measure of it's competence, not it's market power.
If I get scammed on Amazon they are getting a charge-back and will have to
deal with my credit card company.

------
costcopizza
Drive through many American small towns and it looks the exact same.

A strip mall with a Subway, a couple national fast food joints, and if you're
big enough, Wal-Mart.

There are literally 1000s of towns with this copy and paste setup-- how could
this not be detrimental when money is going to a huge corporation every time?

~~~
heyoni
Object-oriented economy. Rather than reusing code, we reuse business plans!

~~~
mauvehaus
If you haven't read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, he refers to people doing
just that (reusing proven business plans) as three-ringers. I.e. people who
got their business plan in a 3-ring binder, and are implementing it without
much in the way of critical thinking about why it works or ambition to do much
beyond implementing it.

------
michaelbuckbee
Multiple other comments in here about this particular niche that the subject
of the story went into (medical supplies), but what came to mind to me was a
similar story about how it's a similar situation with the golf ball market [1]
and from many other stories with eyeglasses (Luxottica artificially dominates
the market).

These are both cases where it's not so much anti-merger/monopoly law that's
the culprit, but the general structure of the legal system that favors those
with the larger pockets and forces out upstart manufacturers.

1 - [http://www.golfdigest.com/story/ball-wars-costco-files-
lawsu...](http://www.golfdigest.com/story/ball-wars-costco-files-lawsuit-
against-acushnet)

~~~
valuearb
Patents are government monopolies created to incentivize inventors to share
their inventions so others could build upon them. The fear was they'd hide
their IP behind factory walls and innovation would be slow.

Now patents are used by those who don't make anything and often don't even
invent anything in order to blackmail those who do.

~~~
flyingfences
"Intellectual Property" is the use of the State's violence in an attempt to
enforce an artificial scarcity upon something that is naturally non-scarce -
information. It is inherently antithetical to a free society and always ends
up hurting the everyman (and society at large) in the long run.

~~~
untangle
When I hear "IP" I now perceive "rent." Rent is drag and is a prime mover in
income inequality.

~~~
flyingfences
The two are not at all alike, though. Rent is payment made in exchange for the
use of a physical, scarce resource. Information, in contrast, is inherently
non-scarce.

------
bko
> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends
> and a beloved employee to the disease, I started a manufacturing company in
> Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever
> automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting
> HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from
> nurses, hospital executives and public health officials, a major grant from
> the National Institutes of Health and robust private investment. But when my
> partners and I tried to sell it to hospitals, we were told time and time
> again that even though it was a better product — a lifesaving product — they
> weren’t able to purchase it. The primary supplier of syringes, which
> controlled 80 percent of the market, structured an arrangement with a vast
> network of hospitals that essentially closed our industry to new firms for
> good.

That last bit sentence me a bit odd. Rather than go into the details of
incentives of hospitals and why they would forgo a better alternative, the
author just attributes it to "monopoly". If this is true, there is some deeper
misalignment with incentives in this industry that won't go away by just
removing product providers that control a significant portion of the market.
Or something that the author doesn't know about the industry that would make
this decision make sense.

~~~
IIIIIIIIIIII
I can speak for a different market in a different country (but I also lived in
the US for a decade): IT freelancing in Germany.

I get paid well, but there is something really strange going on: I can't get
my contracts directly. I always have to go through a company whose sole
business it is to be an intermediate between the (large) company that wants to
hire a freelancer and the freelancer. Note that those freelancers are not
employed by that company and the relationship is pretty loose. The business
pays the intermediary and they pay you, it's a per-project contract.

The large companies won't hire someone directly even though they would save
lots of money (and freelancers would get more). Suspicious as you guys are you
probably think that well, there _must_ be a logical business reason that it
actually really _is_ worth the additional money being spent on the
intermediary. For example, finding and bundling lots of freelancer resumes.
While that sure is a reason it isn't nearly sufficient for an explanation, not
only because they actually do precious little for the money they keep. Also,
the legal side can't be the reason either when I look at how the contracts
between me and the intermediary are set up.

To give one example from a very large client I worked for for 1.5 years as a
freelancer, the reason I was told they go through the intermediary is that it
makes their accounting much easier. Since I once worked for that company and
experienced the exact same thing I was not surprised: When I worked for them
in Silicon Valley I saved the company a lot of money by looking for an
apartment myself. I ended up sharing one with somebody else. However, the
expensive all-inclusive one-bedroom apartment I had had in Mountain View had
the advantage that there only was a single bill (paid by corporate Amex card).
The (far cheaper) shared apartment I got instead produced a handful of
different invoices (furniture rental, cheques for the rent instead of Amex,
etc.), so the company told me they would have preferred to pay the much higher
amount from a single source. Which I don't quite understand - I _do_ have some
business background and understand accounting, in the computer age, what's the
big deal? In the freelancer scenario they said it just works better with their
SAP system then having lots of individual contracts. That company also had a
big program to "streamline" and centralize their purchasing, which of course
means having significantly less firms to deal with as a goal that overrides
other concerns.

So, it seems the large businesses prefer to work with other large businesses,
no matter how much money they could save. We don't even need to argue whether
and/or how much legal and business reasons are valid or not, I think the only
thing that matters for the purpose of the discussion is that the effect
exists, and that that means "market" is more and more a lie the more of a
countries wealth creation is done by big businesses. You don't need to look
for actual "monopolies" in the classical sense, those firms quite voluntarily
restrict themselves (and again, the bottom line is that it exists, how
justifiable it is from the individual firm's POV is a different question,
let's assume they know what they are doing and that it makes sense for them).

~~~
cylinder
When large corporations are comfortable in their revenue side (approaching
monopoly) they obsess over risk. Every contract poses a risk, including
litigation risk. That's probably why. GE is obsessed with outsourcing right
now, they even outsourced the mail room. A side effect is this promotes
inequality as you can no longer get a job in the mailroom and work your way up
to CEO. See the hbr ideacast on this

~~~
Pica_soO
Thank your for the explanation.

------
cmurf
Most legislation, counted in line or pages, is written by industry.
Legislators aren't writing this themselves.

And there's little in the way of taking a strong anti-trust (competition law)
in politics. The Obama administration watched over, and permitted mergers that
very blatantly reduce competition: multiple airlines, and drug companies. And
it was more aggressive overall in applying competition law compared to
previous Republican administrations. So, point is, even with a Democratic
president, competition law isn't pressed strongly enough, let alone with a
Republican in office where it's apparently "we need to recognize more natural
monopolies, and help them whenever possible".

About the only thing all Americans might be able to agree on when it comes to
politics, is the increasingly obvious need for a constitutional amendment
getting money out of politics.

------
mrgreenfur
Does anyone else think that nearly all huge companies exist due to monopolies
or near-monopolies? MS has monopoly on desktops. Apple on cell phones and
tablets. Facebook on social networking. Google on search. I think any market
without at least 3-4 strong competitors will devolve into one dominant player
who can milk more from the customer base.

~~~
EduardoBautista
Android has a higher market share than iOS. How does that make Apple a
monopoly?

~~~
paulddraper
A more apt comparison would be Apple (iOS) vs Samsung (Android) vs LG
(Android) vs Motorola (Android).

And Apple has the most mobile device profits.

Still, I agree: nowhere near a monopoly.

------
wirerc
Rural America could bust monopolies tomorrow if they voted differently.
They've done it before, and they don't need to be rescued by us for that. More
like they need to rescue themselves and the rest of us.

~~~
vacri
Unfortunately voting differently also means voting for social change in other
areas, which rural populations usually aren't eager for.

------
hackbinary
Welcome to the new world of corporate mercantilism.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism)

~~~
valuearb
Mercantilism is how capitalism dies. Self interested capitalists buy
monopolies from politicians until no free markets remain.

Today we have Trump favoring Coal, Oil, military contractors, the Sands
corporation (Sheldon Adelson) and corporations searching for special favors
such as Tariffs, etc, because of their contributions to his campaign.

Hilary would have favored Wall Street banks, hedge funds, "green companies" in
search of federal handouts, unions, etc.

We have the political system we have because of massive contributions by
moneyed players who want either handouts or rules to keep competitors out.

------
DroidX86
First things first: ISPs

~~~
trafficlight
I feel you. I started a small ISP in Montana a few years ago. We're getting
into laying our own duct and fiber.

Once I get the machine running, I want to focus on providing tools and
information to others looking to do the same thing.

I've been running a Slack channel called ISP School for about a year now to
bring together other interested people. Email me at matt@tsi.io if anybody
wants an invitation.

~~~
pyvpx
is TSI a CLEC?

~~~
trafficlight
Nope. We argued that we were providing data services under the FCC definition
of utility. The only real person who got in our way was the city attorney. He
said that internet didn't qualify as Montana Code (circa 1950) only mentioned
telephone and telegraph.

So we registered with the PSC as a telegraph provider...

~~~
MichaelGG
Awesome. Do you actually have to sell telegram services?

~~~
trafficlight
Legally, I don't think so. But we did build a little Raspberry Pi based
machine with a telegraph key. It needs some more work, but there are people
who are legitimately wanting to buy the service.

~~~
neuland
There are people that want to buy telegraph service?

~~~
trafficlight
Surprisingly yes. I think it falls into two categories: nostalgia and hipster.

------
hammock
I wonder if, without monopolies, rural areas would be served at all with the
types goods and services that these companies bring them. It might not be
economically feasible!

------
MichaelBurge
They need to deregulate the entire medical industry, so anyone can start a
medical practice. Right now, doctors control the supply of new medical
licenses, and they're incentivized to restrict the supply so their own wages
go up. The official line is that they can ensure high-quality medical
treatments this way, but that's just something they tell themselves to feel
good about it.

One of the consequences is that doctors are beholden to large corporations who
have teams of lawyers to handle legal issues and malpractice lawsuits. Since
there are limited slots, some of them even work in foreign countries until
they get experience to land a job in the US, which is a waste of talent.

If anyone could start a medical practice, a new syringe company could sell to
smaller practices that haven't yet been mired in enterprise contracts.

Right now, in order to even build a hospital you have to submit "evidence of
need" to the government to get approval. Imagine if every startup had to
convince a bureaucrat that they were needed: fewer people would be interested
in starting one.

It's probably worth considering moving medical negotiations from insurance
companies and employers to the consumer. I don't know that it's very common to
call up multiple doctors and find the one with the lowest price, because
you're paying your insurance company to do the negotiation for you. Taxing
employer-provided health insurance as income might remove the incentive for
them to provide it at all. Together with deregulating the entire medical
industry, it would make it possible to buy cheap treatment without insurance,
which might be enough to make insurance less important.

~~~
maxerickson
There's an awful lot of middle ground between what we have now and "anyone can
start a medical practice".

~~~
MichaelBurge
If I'm reading you right, you're worried about e.g. some crackpot calling
himself a doctor who rubs moonstones on an infection to make the evil spirits
go away. An unfortunate consequence of "anyone can start a medical practice"
is that the crackpot would be allowed to operate, but the negative aspects
could be mitigated by:

* Somebody starting a "Yelp for doctors"

* The government could give some approval stamp to doctors using all the existing restrictions, and you could always ask a doctor "Are you XYZ-approved?" It would be a very serious crime for a moonstone-carrying crackpot to lie about his governmental approval, and his status could be verified on a government website. People who solely use government-approved doctors would still benefit, since licensed doctors would still be competing against unlicensed doctors, so there'd be a limit to how much the government policy could distort the market.

* People who repair your sidewalk or furnace often advertise "licensed, bonded, and insured". A furnace can burn your house down, which seems a similar risk to medical malpractice. You could ask your doctor if he's licensed by the government, has put his personal capital into a bond, and is insured.

~~~
maxerickson
I'm not terribly worried about literal crackpots.

I'm skeptical that "Yelp for doctors" will in practice be more efficient than
up front regulation about who can provide certain services.

I certainly think there are impediments that should be removed, just not all
of them.

~~~
flyingfences
You're skeptical it is possible for something to be more efficient than the US
Government?

------
ChuckMcM
I largely agree with the observations in the article although I believe the
author misstates the intention of government with _" But in the 1980s, folks
in power decided bigger was better, and conventional political wisdom followed
suit."_ The issue with the 80's was that the US economy was in a very weird
place where we had low growth and very high inflation (called 'stagflation' at
the time). The mechanics of the economy were adjusted not to make 'bigger
better' but instead to break out of the state of stagnant inflation.

That the changes weren't undone in the 90s when much of the economic forces
were re-aligned was a problem, but understandable since nobody wanted to go
back to that mode. We are living in the opposite local minimum of growth and
deflation where the economy is growing but inflation isn't happening because
real income is going down.

That said I believe that making single supplier contracts unenforcable would
be an interesting change to try.

~~~
yuhong
This was just after US got off the gold standard, and around the time of the
savings and loans crisis. More recently, Medicare and drug prices is one of my
favorite examples, and the same logic apply to things like the NSA.

~~~
ChuckMcM
A fair point. Missing the connection to the NSA though :-)

And repeating that I agree with the basic premise that single supplier
contracts should be made unenforcable however to do that you have to provide a
way to penalizing companies that do things to enforce them.

~~~
yuhong
The point is that the NSA is funded by government debt, which is their way of
printing money. One of the reasons why we got off the gold standard is
government spending.

------
jondubois
Most 'monopolies' that exist today are artificial - This is because they are
only monopolies to the extent that they are able to:

1\. Keep buying up advertising to make sure that any potential competitor
cannot afford eyeballs.

2\. Keep hiring up as much technical talent as possible to make sure that any
potential competitor doesn't get access to that talent in order to build a
competing product.

3\. Keep subsidising the cost of their own services (at a loss to themselves)
in order to make the market non-viable for any potential competitor.

It's a scorched-earth approach. Any company that has the money can create an
artificial monopoly for themselves by engaging in any of the three activities
above.

However, those activities are increasingly expensive because they drive up
advertising costs and engineer salaries.

If companies keep doing this, eventually, they'll make the market non-viable
even for themselves.

------
charlieflowers
This is behind many (maybe most) of our problems in America. For example, this
is the biggest source of what's wrong with our healthcare system.

Businesses have built up "moats" throughout the system, leading to high prices
and poor service. This is the source of the "cost disease" that makes our
healthcare too expensive.

Competition is part of the very foundation of capitalism. Without it,
capitalism itself doesn't work. So we better figure out some answers.

------
eecc
I found this book rather interesting:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_Capital](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_Capital)
it reflects over essentially the same problem (to make a Marxist critique to
capitalist pretenses of freedom, fairness and its claims to optimality.) Among
other points, the book spends time arguing how Corporate Capitalism is
fundamentally monopolistic.

------
throwaway73363
Apparently this is true not only of the US but also of Japan.

I just finished watching a nice dram series called 'Shitamachi Rocketto' which
might be of interest to folk on HN.

------
geff82
As someone who loves rural USA and especially Texas, how could we spread the
word better? How could we make it more attractive? Do you think there are
other possibilities to revive it besides changing government policies? Let us
brainstorm about it!

------
rdlecler1
Arguably this also affects workers in major centers who have to move to high-
cost housing areas just to be employed while not materially improving quality
of life.

------
perakojotgenije
Well that's deregulated capitalism 101.

------
daodedickinson
Where are the trust-busting candidates?

------
Overtonwindow
Oh you mean like Comcast?

------
arca_vorago
But our savior Peter Theil said monopolies are good and the thing every
company wants to become!

------
dreamdu5t
The article never establishes what is wrong with rural America in the first
place. Why does it need rescuing? Why are businesses with large market share a
problem for rural America? The premise that monopolies are bad is never
explained.

The author never establishes any of this. How did this make it to the front
page?

~~~
wallacoloo
> The article never establishes what is wrong with rural America in the first
> place.

She presented numbers related to how many new businesses were formed recently
in small towns vs large towns. Sure, she didn't go through the hoops to
explain that more new businesses = more new jobs = more local wealth, but
would that have even contributed to the article?

> The premise that monopolies are bad is never explained.

The article _did_ attempt to explain this through an anecdote about a superior
syringe being blocked off the market by another company that held a monopoly
on medical devices & arranged contracts with buyers to lock them in.

Maybe she should have been more explicit - and I'm not trying to say that the
article's good material for HN - but she did at least _touch_ on most of those
points.

------
dingo_bat
If a monopoly is hard-won and not being abused, what's the problem?

------
douche
Or make it profitable to build shit in this country again. If you taxed the
hell out of manufactured imports, and loosened up the regulations that are
choking US businesses to death, you'd have less meth-and-fentanyl scourged
abandoned mill towns.

~~~
ghouse
Which specific regulations do you think are choking US businesses to death? I
see a lot of handwaving about oppressive regulation, but I don't see anything
careful cost-benefit discussion of which regulations are oppressive.

~~~
douche
You've never worked in a blue-collar industry, then. It's a death by 1000
cuts. When your workers are frustrated by the amount of red tape and
regulation surrounding their day to day work tasks, something is wrong.

~~~
Pica_soO
Every factory, the explanation hours for the kindergarden- do not jump, do use
the stairwell rails, do read all the rules, do not use the robots for rodeo.

And if you complain about the stupidness of regulations, the responsibility
shysters barricading proclaim you hysteric or careless. My personal favorite
is lumber-work, where in some of the heavy duty protection equipment you are
supposed to wear is so heavy, people make exhausted stupid mistakes and get
injured because of the security measure. Example references the Kevlar jackets
and trousers- lately partially replaced by lighter plastic protection gear.
The worst part is - some regulations introduce routine- and routine kills.

There are good examples, like the Japanese railroad signal system though, so
its not all bad.

------
iddan
No! Rural America is responsible for the death of millions, Rural America is
the responsible for holding the progression of human race and most important:
rural America is who created the monopolies. Free market can only exist where
states aren't.

