[worik]

> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players

Really?

* Search: What special privilege for Google?

* Desktop OS: Microsoft?

* On line retail: Amazon

What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

> These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.

[majewsky]

So we're back to square one then, and came to agree on the original premise: Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action.

[pdonis]

No, not money. The problem is not that Google, Amazon, etc. can buy special privileges from the government; the problem is that the government has them for sale. It's government power that's the root of the problem, not money. If the government didn't have the power to give out such special privileges (which comes from the power to issue regulations that all businesses must obey), it wouldn't matter how much money Google or Amazon or anyone else had.

In other words, what's "compelling action" here is the government, and its power to do that is not based on money. But since the government is run by humans, who can be bought, the government's power to compel things ends up being for sale. And even if you magically took away all that money from Google and Amazon and spread it around evenly, that would just mean government favors would get curried in other ways. (Plus the fact that, even if you spread the money around evenly once, it wouldn't stay that way.)

[lucyjojo]

the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate, a direct path to a living hell.

[pdonis]

> the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate

No, the alternative is for people to realize that "regulation" provided by government doesn't work--that the only way to effectively regulate a market is for the market participants to do it by the transactions they choose to make and the transactions they choose to refuse. As long as people won't do that--as long as, for example, people continue to believe the fantasy that a valuable service like web search can be provided by Google for free with no downsides, or that everything can be magically cheaper on Amazon without them bullying their supply chain in all kinds of underhanded ways and treating their employees like shit--we're doomed. Government regulation can't save people from themselves. These big companies can only get away with what they do because we keep feeding the monsters.

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

In the same way that computers are a device that exists to search Google, sure.