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This is why I don't consider myself officially a Libertarian despite some fairly strong leanings in that direction. A handful of monopolistic megacorp/cartels using economic power to suppress competition isn't that much different from a handful of government bureaucrats doing that same with laws. Better to have some regulations even if they restrict the markets as first-order effects as long as they result in more free markets on the second and higher orders. And also to solve obvious game-theoretic issues like externalities and coordination problems.
But my ideal government would probably take a Libertarian minimalist government as a template and then patch the bugs until you end up 10-20% of the way towards what we currently have.
Generally I agree with you here but I will say this bit has basically never actually happened in the US, though it is frequently claimed and used to justify regulations that do hurt competition:
Actual monopolies and cartels have long been illegal, so definitions have to shift to something approximating “big company regulators/politicians don’t like.” The consumer welfare standard is a pretty darn good one.
Yeah, we definitely need to move in a more libertarian direction than we are now. It's just that an awful lot of Libertarians claim things like "we need to remove literally all regulations", and I'm like "no, the anti-monopoly, anti-cartel ones are pretty good and we should keep those while we strip out the bad ones."
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