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Notes -
Economies of scale at hyperscale will always produce single digit mega-firm competition. The advantages of this over government-and-single-firm planning are incalculable.
But that's not the point. The point is that new entrants at a smaller scale should be able to enter markets without government approval or interference of any kind. The law of compounding is real; the tiny two-guys-in-their-garage today turns into Apple in 30 short years. In the absence of that, we're all still using IBM mainframes to send dick picks.
To return to the brewery example from the post above (and my post below), we can see that dynamic at work there as well. While it's not true that the market has homogenized and the big consolidated firms aren't actually crowding out competition, it's also true that there would almost certainly be many, many more little breweries all over the place in the absence of government regulation. Would someone on my block turn their garage into a little storefront if they were allowed to just sell home-brewed bottles without requiring a whole raft of government licenses? Almost certainly yes. If someone wants to argue that the licensing and inspection regime is necessary to prevent bad things, that's fine, I can probably find points of agreement, but the tradeoff in tamping down startups has to be acknowledged.
If there's a problem that's stopping startups, it isn't "western capitalism" that's going so, unless this is just calling out that western capitalism tends to have substantial regulatory capture.
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