[cpeterso]

Thought experiment: what if the US government limited companies to a maximum number of employees, say 5000?

There would be new inefficiencies, but it might decrease the possibility or impact of monopolies and encourage competition. There would be a lot more specialized contractor companies. How much of, say, Google's search service or Microsoft Windows could be maintained or developed with just 5000 people?

[true_religion]

We would end up with massive conglomerates who owned 500+ companies of 4999 people, and if that didn't work you'd just get simple collusion where everyone knows company A and B are owned by the same person so they try to cooperate even without being explicitly ordered to.

[wgerard]

It would likely just encourage convoluted corporate structures that would function more-or-less equivalently to the ones we have today.

[xeromal]

There would be 5000 car manufacturers