[khawkins]

Totally fair analysis and I don't disagree at all. I will add, however, that there are a few points that detract from this take.

First of all, when a company aggressively invests in hard capital, innovation, or advertising, they're building eventual value for the company and stock which improves the wealth of shareholders in the long run but rarely helps the entry-level employees in either the short run or long run. However, those costs are thrown above the line as costs and not financed by what is determined to be company profits.

When this innovation is necessary to stay competitive in the market then this is the invisible hand working properly to balance capital investment against worker living conditions. Eventually, many workers will benefit from the advancements in the form of cheaper/better goods.

However, when capital investment is used to rapidly grab near-monopolistic control of the market in an attempt to wedge out competitors, the invisible hand forces aren't necessarily at play.

If a company's leaders choose to grow at a modest pace and put more money into the well being of their employees they might not be able to grab such a dominant market share, but they'll have treated their employees better. Further, more competitors means that invisible hand forces will naturally improve services.

I think the general problem is that the FTC has been very lax in recent years. Vertical monopolies aren't treated very seriously as the means to establishing horizontal monopolies or oligopolies. On top of that, the companies are trying to jump off shore as quickly as possible to evade serious control.

[jerf]

A lot of this is why I didn't say it wouldn't affect Jeff at all, or try to predict the particular impact, but just that it would be... strange. Even if you could objectively analyze the full business picture, nobody could fully analyze exactly how Wall Street would react; the ability to do that would imply the ability to get very rich on Wall Street very quickly.

I forget where it was, but I also recently read an article musing on the idea that in the modern era we seem to have a new threat emerging where companies establish very, very firm footholds in some particular industry, and then use that to leverage their way into other industries because they can literally out-resource the entire competitor base of that industry. In some sense, in theory this has been possible for a long time, and we've had things like Samsung which are massive conglomerates, so it's not a new problem in quality, but the quantity of money that can be brought to bear this way in the 21st century may still make this a new sort of problem for trust busters to keep their eyes on.