The Great Cheeto can say "I don't like regulation, but I don't like China more" and be consistent.
As a conservative leaning US citizen, things like these have me seriously questioning what the point of all this is- our nation obviously needs to do this differently, but as someone who ostensibly believes in a "free market" / laissez-faire economics, this is a hard problem to swallow. Personally, I've found that anti-trust regulation, Government involvement [iterference, if you don't like it], and forbidding horizontal consolidation, is necessary to the maintaining of a free market, because as companies grow huge (IE Google) they seem to always become anti-competive to keep growing.
Maybe the thing to do is change the way that companies report financial gains to promote a more long-term approach- just as China has been operating on the basis of four- and five-year plans, it might be better for everyone (except Wall Street's HFT bots) if the financial structure of the US was changed to encourage longer-term planning.
Another possibility: there's nothing particularly "conservative" about the corporation as a created entity. That was an invention of Congress and the courts, and Congress could decide it should be diminished or even go away entirely. Fewer corporations would mean fewer victims of corporations...
> they seem to always become anti-competive to keep growing.
They also tend to sort of merge with government. At some point they figure out there is better ROI in buying government influence and using it to insulate themselves from competition than in investing in a better product.
Libertarian idealism says that economy and state should be separate, but I don't think that's entirely possible in practice. The trouble is that sufficiently large concentrations of wealth are able to easily buy access to state power or even tend to become indistinguishable from the state.
As a conservative leaning US citizen, things like these have me seriously questioning what the point of all this is- our nation obviously needs to do this differently, but as someone who ostensibly believes in a "free market" / laissez-faire economics, this is a hard problem to swallow. Personally, I've found that anti-trust regulation, Government involvement [iterference, if you don't like it], and forbidding horizontal consolidation, is necessary to the maintaining of a free market, because as companies grow huge (IE Google) they seem to always become anti-competive to keep growing.
Maybe the thing to do is change the way that companies report financial gains to promote a more long-term approach- just as China has been operating on the basis of four- and five-year plans, it might be better for everyone (except Wall Street's HFT bots) if the financial structure of the US was changed to encourage longer-term planning.