The state blocking freely agreed transactions because it would allow someone to create something larger and more coercive than the state seems like a good minimum.
We don't have to debate past and future hypotheticals - that's an invention of the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. The one that said it's entirely fine for, say, Apple to have a monopoly on iOS software as long as they have a prosocial justification for it. Apple's specific argument is that their monopoly protects from malware... or, in other words, they're big enough that they can make and enforce their own laws.
A better and simpler rule is this: being big is illegal, period. That's how antitrust used to work. If a business deal would give you the capability of becoming your own sovereign state, you don't get to execute that deal. If you knock out all your competition, we break you up into competing companies.
This is the sort of thing that triggers free market types, I know. My argument is specifically that large businesses get to write their own rules, and the only way to prevent them from doing that is to make them small enough that they cannot execute political power equivalent to that of a monarch. Right now, we live in this comedic parody of free market liberalism where the business owners have centralized power to themselves, turning themselves into de-facto states, and gotten the de-jure state drunk on surveillance tech to avoid scrutiny.
We don't have to debate past and future hypotheticals - that's an invention of the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. The one that said it's entirely fine for, say, Apple to have a monopoly on iOS software as long as they have a prosocial justification for it. Apple's specific argument is that their monopoly protects from malware... or, in other words, they're big enough that they can make and enforce their own laws.
A better and simpler rule is this: being big is illegal, period. That's how antitrust used to work. If a business deal would give you the capability of becoming your own sovereign state, you don't get to execute that deal. If you knock out all your competition, we break you up into competing companies.
This is the sort of thing that triggers free market types, I know. My argument is specifically that large businesses get to write their own rules, and the only way to prevent them from doing that is to make them small enough that they cannot execute political power equivalent to that of a monarch. Right now, we live in this comedic parody of free market liberalism where the business owners have centralized power to themselves, turning themselves into de-facto states, and gotten the de-jure state drunk on surveillance tech to avoid scrutiny.