

Return of the corporate giants - spooneybarger
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14303582&source=hptextfeature

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hristov
This is really a pointless article. The author just repeated a bunch of semi
related well publicized memes and there you go. No research, no data, no
insight. Are giant companies really returning? God knows.

But I would still like to note the little lies and half truths the Economist
loves to peddle so much. The first it that deregulation helped the emergence
of small companies. Not exactly true. You can cite deregulations that may have
helped smaller companies, but a lot of regulations helped small companies too.
The most important one is antitrust regulation which severely restricted IBM
and resulted in the emergence of the personal computer. Another regulation
that really helped small companies were the laws that required telecoms to
allow small ISPs to use their equipment. That allowed affordable Internet
which really helped popularize the internet. That law was removed later on and
that really hurt small companies driving many ISPs out of business.

The other huge half truth (or lie by omission) the Economist commits has to do
with the whole idea of how it complains that governments are propping up
failing companies like General Motors. That is a lie by omission because the
Economist does not criticize (and it actually actively supports) the
governments propping up much larger failing companies -- the banks. General
Motors is peanuts compared to the banks in terms of government resources
needed to prop it up. But the Economist complains about General Motors non
stop in order to build up its libertarian cred and then brazenly supports much
bigger subsidies to the banks.

~~~
maigret
You have a point - visualization data here
<http://www.propublica.org/special/government-bailouts>

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ojbyrne
I mostly agree with the point of this article, but I also mostly agree with
the 2 commenters below. The Economist is generally a pretty shallow
publication that has somehow managed to market itself as being deep and
incisive. This article is (like almost every article they publish), shallow,
content-free, and anecdotal.

Much like the other article on the front page, which I also mostly agree with,
but think that the reasoning behind it is a joke.

Just about every publication on the planet works harder to argue their point,
while the Economist assumes this godlike manner, without attribution,
substance, or argument.

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brc
what an utter load of anecdotal crap

