The Monopoly Party

One of our great parties has been taken over by pro-monopoly radicals.  Most of the supporters of that party don't know that, but the monopolists have figured out that if they can sell their story of laissez-faire economics,  support for religious wedge issues and by sowing disruption and conflict in their party and their opponents, they can gain power and keep their monopolies despite it being against the law.

The most obvious monopolies are the big banks, the big oil companies, the big insurers, and a few others, most notably Walmart, the biggest company in the world.  Many of these are not literally monopolies: e.g. 4 banks control $8T of the $10.5T total assets managed by all US banks.  But they collude on policy--you really don't have much choice, and none of the hundreds of smaller banks can compete with any of the big 4 even if they have a better product.

The pro-monopolists want monopoly in other things than their own narrow business:  they strenuously object if anybody criticizes them.  They teach their naïve supporters that any arm of government that doesn't do exactly what they want them to is dangerous and can't be tolerated.  They work very hard to discredit opposing opinion, a lot of it through name calling.  (they talk about taxation without representation: in fact they have a lot of representation---the Tea Party are about 10% of the electorate but they control one house of congress and successfully block all action in the other).   They look for opportunities to suppress voters likely to object to them.  They suggest that some offenses are so bad that such people should not receive due process.  They tell us--against all evidence--that the current Democratic president is the most outrageously radical leftist in our history...in fact he is one of the two most conservative Democrats since the 19th century and about even on the left-right spectrum with Nixon and Eisenhower and not far left of their plaster hero, Reagan.

Most dangerously, they have been buying up and monopolizing media, so that only their narrow, pro-monopoly message gets out.  There are a few centrist news operations remaining: New York Times, MSNBC, Huffington Post, etc., but most of the mainstream has moved very far right.  An important way to do this is by buying lots of advertising and hinting that the funding source will dry up if they don't give "equal time" to their pet right wing pundits.  Many of the bastions of good reporting: the Wall Street Journal, the PBS News Hour, 60 Minutes, The Washington Post, and more, have fallen prey to this.  The once carefully neutral PBS New Hour will give equal time to a knowledgeable expert and a crackpot, and sometimes they skip the expert altogether. There are NO left wing news sites with a significant following in America and precious few elsewhere.

The bottom line is this: Laissez-Faire is anything but fair, free enterprise.  It can be, for a little while.  But very quickly, it almost always degenerates into monopoly or race to the bottom, and without regulation, once you have monopoly or race to the bottom, it's practically impossible to break out.  There are very few supporters of Laissez-Faire who have an informed understanding of it and its history.  But there are tens of millions who hear that there's freedom involved and stop thinking at that point.  Ayn Rand's childish wish-fulfilment fantasy novels are very popular among these people.

Nobody argues that we should do away with referees in sports.  We can sometimes get away with it in sandlots and schoolyards, but very often it degenerates into disputes and cheating--where nothing is on the line but bragging rights for a few kids.  But that's what the monopoly party wants us to do in politics and business and media.  Millions of lives are on the line.