Imagine for a moment you are fourteen years old and you are bored because social media hasn’t been invented yet. You decide to get together with three of your friends and have a rousing game of Monopoly. Assuming you are all equally matched, what will be the outcome of the afternoon? Of course, one of the four will win, but who that is will be random. The other three will all be bankrupt. That is exactly how capitalism works, but instead of a couple of hours, it may take a hundred years or more. Is this how we want the world to end up? One person or company with all the marbles? Able to sell for whatever price they want? No longer any real need to innovate?
We have many anti-trust laws on the books designed at preventing a single company from controlling a segment of the economy. The problem is most of these laws aren’t being rigorously enforced. This is allowing many companies to engage in unfair or predatory business practices. The first course of action should be to start enforcing these laws vigorously and not allow the enforcement to drag out for years. The other thing needing to be addressed is the shear size of some of these corporations. There are currently four publicly traded companies in the United States with market capitalizations over ONE TRILLION dollars. They are: Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
This is just my opinion, but I think corporations should be limited in size. I think the limit should be one trillion dollars in market capitalization. Maybe another measure such as market dominance could be used. At the current time it would affect only the above four companies. They would be forced to evaluate their operations and spin off a portion of their business into another, new corporation. Stock in the new corporation would be issued to existing stockholders in proportion to their current number of shares. There are rules in place about interlocking directorates so the new corporation would start to follow it’s own path. There might be some problems with foreign owned corporations and private equity companies, but these can be worked out.
Capitalism as an economic system only works if there are boundaries that it must recognize and stay within.
Pete's Wisdom 