[jerf]

"If we mandate competition, it's not a FREE market."

In addition to the other fine replies made, I want to highlight this to strongly disagree with it. In fact actually having a free market requires aggressively protecting it when a given market naturally coalesces into a monopoly or oligarchy. Trust-busting isn't an anti-free-market position, it's a pro-free-market position. The anti-free-market actions come from governments picking winners and enshrining monopolies/oligarchies through regulatory capture.

In particular, when advocates of other social organizations level this as a criticism of free market, my response is to point out that when you have lack of mandated competition with some form of government-selected winners, be it communism, socialism, or "crony capitalism", you don't have a free market at all and the criticism is more generally applicable to the social organization being argued for by the person raising this criticism.

In a free market, a new company always ought to be able to come along and completely destroy an existing company if they do a good enough job. If you don't have this, you don't have a free market.

[dantheman]

Trust busting is an anti-free-market position. The freemarket consists of individuals voluntarily interacting. Any position that advocates coercion, i.e. government interference, is anti-free-market.

[jerf]

Trusts are a coercion, and a crime greater than a bit of government trust-busting. (Or, in really far-out versions of anarchist theory, non-government trust busting. I don't know of any real-world examples of that, though.) I do not naively believe that an economy can be run completely without coercion, but that such coercion as is necessary should be turned to keeping the market free. The optimal ideal case for free markets simply doesn't obtain everywhere. Spectrum is at least dubious; perhaps now we could just run it as a free market and it could work (people with far more knowledge about radio issues than me have argued both sides of this, I can only sit on the sidelines of that one and wave genially) but that certainly wasn't the case in the analog radio era.