But Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics and Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party assured me that mergers and trusts were good for me! Look, the companies even have self-serving rationalizations scribbled with crayons on butcher paper saying the same thing!

Seriously, though: I cannot believe how high and how far these utterly dogshit arguments flew without pushback and the amount of damage that consolidation has done to the American Experiment. The best time to get a Lina Khan in the FTC was 40 years ago but the second best time was 4 years ago. I just hope the next president picks up the project... though I'm sure the (by then) trillionaires will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.

Not to mention the number of ordinary people who still parrot the utter dogshit arguments to this day despite being actively harmed by them

It's crazy the fan fiction we have allowed to be recon'd into being 'Capitalism' when Capitalist thinkers thought that rent seekers/monopolies were destructive to Capitalist, and that strong government oversight was key part of a strong Capitalist system.