[fr11]

A lot of folks, including Nathan Robinson, seem to have a weird idea that proponents of capitalism think that it creates freedom. I think a more accurate way of thinking about it is that freedom creates capitalism. Black markets are a sign of the imperfect control of people, for example.

But as for what we should do about Amazon, there's a response that is more principled than just breaking up Amazon because they're huge, and that acknowledges the massive failure in history of socialist control of things. (Sorry, socialists - governments don't run things well, with exceptions that are interesting and worth study, but not yet repeatable)

We need to ban companies from both creating and distributing if they're at a certain size. This worked really well in a bunch of states for liquor laws, and would prevent the current idiocy with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Apple, and Disney streaming channels that have their own content. Let Netflix and whoever else wants to compete on distribution, and don't let them create their own content unless they offer it for distribution to anyone else who wants to distribute it, for standard terms.

Same with Amazon.