And notably, we used to have a somewhat progressive corporate income tax which, at least on paper, provided a quantitative disincentive against too much consolidation. Sometimes the merger of A and B would pay a higher rate than A and B separately. And we gave that mechanism up.

Do decentralized banking is better for business competition and market health.

But we live in a too big to fail, regulatory capture environment.

An assumption required to make capitalism work efficiently is that customers have meaningful choices. Trustbusting is one of the important roles of the government, if it were functional.

we dont need new punishments, the system is just backwards. for things like shoplifting and vandalism it should be double or triple damages with no prison. corporate fraud, cartels, pollution, big time tax evasion has to come with 20+ year sentences and fines based on your income like a traffic violation in norway. flat fines just dont work when the criminal is rich.

in general we should be a lot more strict on sexual crimes (sa, trafficking, child abuse but not voluntary prostitution) and white collar/economic ones including wage theft, but less strict on drugs and property. drug possession and non commercial digital piracy should be decriminalized.

violent crimes are mostly in the right place, the big problem there is racist prosecutors and ineffective anti gang programs not the laws themselves but we need to remove death penalty/life without parole everywhere they still exist.

the point is we need a rebalance not a whole new untested mechanic.

>the fines don't make sense for the white collar crimes.

why do we need to jump to caning instead of increasing the fines to something more than an operating expense?

in this case, if the fine was 1000x the profits instead of the other way around, the problem would be solved, right?

And rotten tomato pelting would probably helpfully lower the rate of people turning their resentments into content.

Along with this we need the revocation of corporate charters and the liquidation of all assets belonging to the owners of any corp that is dissolved in this manner. The penalty for fucking over the public in general should be a lifetime of poverty.

The Associated Monopolies of America.

Collusion is not a market force and is actually highly illegal and corrupting of markets, so this doesn't seem relevant at all.

Consumers don't want to understand it because they don't want to consume less.

The chart is meant to show how absurd the conspiracy theory is, but it turns out it’s literally what happened this time around at least. Well they didn’t forget their greed of course, they just temporarily lost the ability to exercise it.

Greed isn’t “forgotten” its reined in by regulation.

As the article says, people have a hard time understanding it because it turned out not to be what's happening. I was on the other side of the debate, I thought it was absurd, but it turns out egg company executives really were sending each other messages saying "let's manipulate the price upwards so that we can make more money".

win/wind: get caught, pay minor tax; dont get caught, get to keep minor tax

If you want more aggressive anti trust enforcement, voters must vote better, for candidates and administrations that will aggressively enforce.

"naked conspiracy to manipulate the price of eggs from 2022-2025. "

Who was in charge during this time period?

Do you have any evidence the settlement terms are corrupt? There were 17 states involved. Many of those states have governors that are not in the same party as the president. https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d...