All these analysis put a lot of stock on the democrats being Anti-market, because well, it is in the democratic discourse. But I think that is misreading that discourse. A lot of it is that the democrats are rightly very scared and suspiscious (almost paranoid), over monopolies, monopsonies, and cartelization. And they don’t just endorse the obvious solution of agressively breaking up companies. (since it is bad for buisnesses even though it is good for competition)
But i just don’t think that it is the only way to frame that. Especially Biden’s SEC and FTC are very skeptical of M and A because they are very scared of monopolies, and most of the democratic policies make sense in a we think that there might be an x monopoly, and we dont just want to point antitrust at it, so what should we do.
And generally the solution that they come up with is that government should engage in effectively price negotiations with the monopoly provider, where they use to law to get people to coordinate in bargining for a better price, so you end up with 2 agent no alt bargianing as the pricing mechanism), hopefully to agree to something closer to the free market pricing (the price capping). That is a bad pricing mechanism (often ending up below market). It is really hard to figure out the coordination method used so as to break them up. This is a bad solution. If you think there is a cartel, you don’t put in a price cap, you break the cartel.
I noticed another thing.
All these analysis put a lot of stock on the democrats being Anti-market, because well, it is in the democratic discourse. But I think that is misreading that discourse. A lot of it is that the democrats are rightly very scared and suspiscious (almost paranoid), over monopolies, monopsonies, and cartelization. And they don’t just endorse the obvious solution of agressively breaking up companies. (since it is bad for buisnesses even though it is good for competition)
But i just don’t think that it is the only way to frame that. Especially Biden’s SEC and FTC are very skeptical of M and A because they are very scared of monopolies, and most of the democratic policies make sense in a we think that there might be an x monopoly, and we dont just want to point antitrust at it, so what should we do.
And generally the solution that they come up with is that government should engage in effectively price negotiations with the monopoly provider, where they use to law to get people to coordinate in bargining for a better price, so you end up with 2 agent no alt bargianing as the pricing mechanism), hopefully to agree to something closer to the free market pricing (the price capping). That is a bad pricing mechanism (often ending up below market). It is really hard to figure out the coordination method used so as to break them up. This is a bad solution. If you think there is a cartel, you don’t put in a price cap, you break the cartel.