Merging Wealth Into Greater Wealth

2015 WAS THE YEAR OF the merger. Over four point three trillion dollars in corporate assets were merged worldwide, a world record, over half of which were American. This doesn't include the biggest merger of all, which is pending but evidently inevitable; the merger of Dow and Dupont. Most if not all of the recent epidemic of corporate mergers are arguably illegal. When the industrial revolution came to America after the Civil War, powerful wealthy people and large corporations started forming monopolies, stifling competition, free trade, and capitalism. We passed laws against this behavior, laws which work quite well, when inforced, but the anti-trust laws are no longer enforced, and haven't been since Ronald Reagan made America a friendlier place for the extremely wealthy. Every major industry is continuing the trend which began in the eighties; consolidation, conglomeration, the establishment of a monopolized economy. Welcome to the surrealistic world economy thirty five years into Reaganomics: the wealthy are wealthier than ever, and the poor at least as poor as they have ever been, and more numerous. How long until one person, possibly a corporation, has all the world's wealth? What we in America call supply side trickle down laizzez faire free market Reaganomics, the rest of the world calls "neo-liberalism". It consists of an absence of governement as an influence in the capitalistic economy, aka deregulation. Exclude the government from the economy, and what you end up with is not greater prosperity for one and all, as advertised, but rather, a wild west economy of chaos, with a few very aggressive people becoming extremely wealthy, and most of us impoverished. There was a time when corporate monopolies were illegal, and technically they still are, though you would never know it. Neo-liberal economics is based on the belief that the more freely the economy can operate, the more successful it will be, which is an utterly insane notion. The Sherman Anti-trust Act was a good idea in 1890, and its a good idea now, band we are lucky people like Ted Cruz and the Tea Party haven't repealed it, although, in reality, they have.