Resurrecting Free Enterprise

TAYLOR SWIFT and a large corporation with a funny name (Google) have accomplished what more than a century of anti-trust legislation could not; they have inspired a resurrection of anti-trust action intended to prevent the further distortion of capitalism by eliminating monopolies. Sometimes a monopolistic business enterprise becomes so overloaded with its bloated customer base that it loses track of itself and its sales success, and implodes. Hence, millions of people, fans of cute young ladies with voices straight from junior high school, wanting desperately to attend a Taylor Swift concert, were stymied in their pursuit of pop culture by a ticket dealing entity too big for its own britches, unable to keep track of its own retail sales. And Google? How dare you even think about trying to advertise with any other advertising dispenser! The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (1914), which strengthened its predecessor, were enacted to prevent just such distortions of free enterprise, and easily could have, had they only been utilized, but for decades have both lain dormant in our era of unregulated Reagonomics and corporate rampage. According to Adam SMith, the "godfather" of modern capitalism, monopolies, in the absence of external factors which distort the frEe market, monopolies would never emerge. (the Wealth of Nations, 1776). In modern America, in an economy beseiged by and inundated with unforeseen externalities (factors which distort the free market, such as labor unions, bad weather, and conspiracies), the economy has coalesced into a virtual monopoly in every major erea of production and distribution. So much so that in one of his seminal books, historian Gore Vidal asked: "Didn't we used to have something called the "Sherman Anti-Trust Act"? Were not "combinations in restraint of trade" deemed long ago to be unacceptable? Whatever happened to it? What happened is that it was ignored in the post World War economic boom, as corporations tightened their control of the political process, and sent to Congress a veritable bevy of corporate facilitators, creating a class of what Vidal quite corrrectly called "our corporate masters". Monopolies are perfectly acceptable only to those busines interests which benefit from them, the monopolists themselves. To everyone else, they are a hindrence to a thriving, healthy, consumer economy. But now, at long last, to the rescue croons Taylor Swift, and Google, advertising its way to the demise of its own privileged position. Assuming that these twin titans of modern American culture are the harbingers of litigation to come, we seem to be singing and googling our way out of our our self inflicted anti-capitalistic morass.