03-10-2024, 10:38 PM
You're leaving a couple big details out. When Standard oil was broken up, John Rockefeller retained his full ownership of the new new separate oil companies. He actually became even more rich because now he owned 35 oil companies instead of one. The mess that the oil business in the US became afterwards is far from some major success. I'm sure there are others on here that can way better explain the many regulatory problems that started after standard oil was split, so I won't. The one thing that can be said though, private property rights remained as there was no forced ownership change.
AT&T was even dumber. Their monopoly privileges were a result of them being a "utility". It's a problem with most utilities. Somehow we allow monopoly privileges so that there's one"reliable" provider instead of multiple competitors competing against each other. The only thing that needed to happen to allow competition was for it to allow competition. It wasn't the divergence of the "baby bells" but finally having other long distance providers like Sprint and MCI popup that allowed for prices to drop. Once reliable broadband Internet and cell phones became the norm, the cost for telephone service became an afterthought.
Google along with the other FAANG companies are in their positions because of the partnerships they formed with the government, becoming a defacto government agencies. There's so much wrong there, that conversation has nothing to do with private property and capitalism. There's also affordable competitors to each of Google's services. The problem isn't that they are a monopoly but their cozy relationship with the feds.
Private ownership will not lead to council housing. What will is the likely coming bailout of "too big to fail" landlords. Blackrocks BREIT etf is already showing tremendous losses and the the prices are just starting to drop. They're going to continue unless the Fed prints a bunch of money to bail them out. In a free market you need failure to cleanse the malinvestment. When the REPO market was starting to collapse in the fall of 2019, the real estate prices were also dropping. It wasn't until summer 2020 when things exploded because of the money printing bailing the markets out.
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