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Remember Conglomerates? It just keeps changing name.

Free competitive markets are not an emergent natural phenomenon, they are a technology of civilised societies, and without governments constantly keeping markets free, we keep reverting back to to robber barons and eventually petty warlord kings, that's the natural low-energy state of humans if you let it go unchecked.

Seems to be the expected outcome of everything, in every industry, for the past 10 years or so.

> 10 years or so

Centuries, really, with only periodic exceptions.

Makes you wonder what happens when all that is left is a single national company and a couple of ever struggling businesses

It’s the expected outcome of capitalism in the absence of effective market regulation.

just capitalism in the final stage

Yes, "Late Stage Capitalism" the idea from the text written in 1902 by Werner Sombart.

The real comical part is we have almost been in the "late stage" as long as the time between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the generation of this stupid idea.