[istjohn]

There is a long-standing idea in American political thought going back to James Madison that the centralization of capital in too few hands poses a danger for democracy.

In the Gilded Age, Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and later created the FTC.

In 1941, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”

Then in the 1970s the Supreme Court nerfed the Sherman Act, and it's all been downhill from there.