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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

Free trade has little impact on monopolies. The biggest corporations in the US are international and the massive amount of free trade we've had from Reagan to Trump's second term has only resulted in these companies becoming even more consolidated.

What free trade enables is for monopolistic corporations to take control of foreign resources to circumvent and undermine US labor laws. They'll buy the rights to the same crops growing in Mexico or Candida for cheaper than the US to undercut US farmers. None of that changes the price they are selling goods in the US and in fact ultimately results in prices going up in both Mexico and Candida.

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You claim that a law that prevents or hinders you from making transactions with certain parties, while privileging other parties by exempting them from these restrictions, doesn't make it easier for the privileged parties to form a monopoly?

No, I claim that we spend 3 decades of free trade and we didn't see corporations get smaller. Republicans and Democrats had a free trade policy since Carter really.

If it were true that free trade results in more competition, then you'd expect that there would be more companies competing, not fewer. We see fewer companies.

Your theory has been tested in reality and it fails.

Free trade isn't the issue, the issue is monopolies. When there were 60 or 80 companies all in the same industry but in different states or counties, the economy was much healthier because those 80 companies had to have their own independent staff for functions like accounting. And they also had to compete with each other at the edges of their jurisdictions. None of them could become powerful enough to set policy across the nation and if a corporate policy was beneficial to the consumer, one of their competitors could enact it to compete. Now that there are only 2 or 3 nationwide providers of most things, those companies can just set their own policies whether hostile or not and the only control we have is regulation.

If you want to eliminate regulation and promote free trade then the best thing you can do is oppose the formation of monopolies and encourage enforcement of anti-trust everywhere.

There are many other factors affecting the size of corporations. For example, a significant increase in the amount of regulation in other sectors of the economy.

More importantly, the raw number of corporations isn't how you measure a monopoly. Profit margins are the key sign of monopoly pricing- but in practice, corporate profit margins have been relatively stable in percentage terms over time. Prices for virtually all consumer goods are way down in real terms over the last 30 years.

In particular, trade might get you more competition with fewer corporations, but via competition with overseas producers. These might show up as a few importing corporations, representing a whole slew of competitors abroad.

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