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It's a little hard to tell if you're asking "are there laws against monopolies?" or "should there be laws against monopolies?".

The answer to the first is a certain yes. There are laws against businesses forming monopolies in the United States. You can read up on the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts from the 1890s and 1910s to start with. There is also considerable case law stemming from this legislation.

The answer to "should there be laws against monopolies" is a little more open. One theoretical justification for breaking up monopolies, is that in some cases monopolies cause economic inefficiencies. Look up "deadweight loss from monopoly pricing".

It's very complicated to measure any efficiencies or inefficiencies from tech monopolies, so I don't think there's a clear answer.

It's also not generally agreed upon that economic efficiency should be the goal of government, so there is a lot of room for debate on that question.




Those are great points. I didn't break my main thoughts into those two smaller thoughts. And I also appreciate this comment:

> It's also not generally agreed upon that economic efficiency should be the goal of government

I think you managed to sum up my thoughts much better than I did.


>There are laws against businesses forming monopolies in the United States

That is not true. There are laws against certain behavior by monopolies.

Here's the Sherman Antitrust Act you mentioned, which makes this clear [1].

As such, it's not legal to simply break up a monopoly solely because they're a monopoly. They have to exhibit specified illegal behavior first.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890


You've confused some things. "Economic efficiency", as espoused by Bork and the rest of his Chicago School crew, came as a result of consolidation. His argument against strong antitrust enforcement was that it lowered economic efficiency to benefit smaller non-monopoly companies.

This of course was a disaster for the American economy and it's taken 30 years of increasing corporate concentration for the politics to finally swing back against monopoly.




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