"only a pawn in their game" (but not totally)

"When companies act in parallel, the consumer is in the same position as if he were dealing with just one big firm," wrote Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu, in his April 2013 New Yorker article, 'The Oligopoly Problem.'

..."If a monopolist did what the wireless carriers did as a group, neither the public nor government would stand for it.   Our scrutiny and regulation of monopolists is well established -- just ask Microsoft or the old AT & T.  But when three or four firms pursue identical practices, we say that the market is "competitive" and everything is fine.

...This "sheds light on a long-standing problem with how we think about and treat anticompetitive practices in the United States."

[[We say the market is "competitive" yet in actuality it is "anticompetitive." ...]]

"...Back in the mid-century, the Justice Department went after oligopolistic cartels...

Like many things from the nineteen-seventies, the treatment of oligopoly was subject to an enormous backlash in the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties....

And with some justification....

But just as the nineteen-seventies went too far,

the reaction

to the nineteen-seventies has also

gone too far....

leaving consumers

undefended."---- [end article quotes]

=====================
When we make a positive change, or a slow, evolving-style shift, in our country and society, sometimes (or always?) there are these things, which are problems:
-- it goes too far
-- it gets "abused" or misused, in some way.

We need (and should appreciate) Business,
and we need (and should appreciate) Government.

When one or the other gets too much power, "we" (the people, represented by our folks in Congress and our president) pull 'em back toward the center of -- sanity -- uhm, oh-I-mean balanced fairness and what's good in the long run for everybody, or for our society as a whole. 

Some people, or entities, if they get power, can handle it wisely.
Some can't.
Or don't.

If Government gets a large bunch of power and uses it unwisely, you can wind up with a police state, i.e., U.S.S.R. and similar....
If Business gets a large bunch of power and uses it unwisely, runs amok or whatever, you can wind up with self-dealing, bad economy and the attendant problems of that, low opportunities, and -- thinking about this, cannot help but remember a Reader Comment typed in one day on the internet -- "If slavery were legal, Walmart would sell slaves. 

They would be right next to the gardening implements."

=====================
We've been over this before.  26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt (R-New York) was known for his "trust-busting" -- (it's wonderful when things rhyme, makes them easier to remember on our high school history tests)....

...though it says (on the History website) "He sought to regulate, rather than dissolve, most trusts."
(See -- the actual thing will be smaller and regular; but the "sound bite" will be big & more dramatic and free of nuance -- and it will rhyme:  "trust-buster"!

It also says President Roosevelt was "The Father of Conservation."

A Republican tree-hugger.

Dude.

---------------------------
[references / "History" website]

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