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> the market would (and should) be an ongoing conversation between suppliers and consumers to reach all the profitable corners of supply and demand, rather than a couple behemoths with megaphones telling us how great they are

I agree but where do we see this? Everywhere I look it’s mega corps. Food, fuel, power, electronics, clothes. I can’t think of a good example of the ideal relationship.

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mostly in commodities markets (almost by definition, ha). if we had an anti-trust division with any teeth, we'd have many more markets like this, as that's the whole point of anti-trust enforcement--to un-distort markets to drive greater efficiencies and maximize value across the economy (not just in large corps and solely for the already wealthy).

Monopolies are optimally efficient across the economy, as long as the monopolist doesn't get too greedy. Competition is wasteful -- competition is why the deadweigh loss ad industry exists!

monopolies seeming to be efficient like that is only true in a limited static analysis. in a dynamic and complex economy, there's great value in the flexibility, ingenuity, resilience, price discovery, and creative restructuring provided by multiple competitors in a given market.

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