[const_cast]

They always inevitably end up being given special privileges.

Because, contrary to what we would all like to believe, once a company becomes large we don't want them to go under, even if they're not optimal.

There's a huge amount of jobs, institutional knowledge, processes, capital, etc in these big monopolies. Like if Boeing just went under today, how long would it take for another company to re-figure out how to make airplanes? I mean, take a look at NASA. We went to the moon, but can we do it again? It would be very difficult. Because so many engineers retired and IP was allowed to just... rot.

It's a balancing act. Obviously we want to keep the market as free as possible and yadda yadda invisible hand. But we also have national security to consider, and practicality.