https://boingboing.net/2018/05/22/too-big-to-fail-2.html/ The emerging split in modern trustbusting: Alexander Hamilton's Fully Automated Luxury Communism vs Thomas Jefferson's Redecentralization 2 days ago Cory Doctorow From the late 1970s on, the Chicago School economists worked with the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet and Brian Mulroney to dismantle antitrust enforcement, declaring that the only time government should intervene is when monopolists conspired to raise prices -- everything else was fair game. Some 40 years later, a new generation of trustbusters have emerged, with their crosshairs centered on Big Tech, the first industry to grow up under these new, monopoly-friendly rules, and thus the first (but far from the only) example of an industry in which markets, finance and regulatory capture were allowed to work their magic to produce a highly concentrated sector of seemingly untame-able giants who are growing bigger by the day. The new anti-monopolism is still in its infancy but a very old division has emerged within its ranks: the Jeffersonian ideal of decentralized power (represented by trustbusters who want to break up Big Tech into small, manageable firms that are too small to crush emerging rivals or capture regulators) versus the Hamiltonian ideal of efficiency at scale, tempered by expert regulation that forces firms to behave in the public interest (with the end-game sometimes being "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" in which the central planning efficiencies of Wal-Mart and Amazon are put in the public's hands, rather than their shareholders'). (....) (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))