“The
Boston Tea Party was not about taxes; it was about monopoly.”
-----from The Quotations of Chairman
Joe”
It transpires that there is a good reason we in the
United States are bone ignorant about the degree to which our economy
is becoming monopolized. Around 1981, the Federal Trade Commission
stopped collecting data on the concentration of various industries.
(1)
David Leonhardt, writing in The New York Times,
points out that there has always been a strong strain of
anti-monopoly sentiment coursing throughout American History.
Indeed, as he rightly points out, the Boston Tea Party, a fabled
event in our collective consciousness, was a revolt not against taxes
but against the newly granted monopoly authorized by Parliament to the
East India Tea Company. That the revolt has been presented by our
schoolmasters as a tax revolt is a transparent besmirching of the
historical record by those who rightly fear a populist revolt against
entrenched privilege.
“America was born as a 'nation of farmers and
small-town entrepreneurs', writes Leonhardt, citing the historian Richard Hofstadter who described Americans as "'anti-authoritarian,
egalitarian and competitive.' Hostility to corporate bigness animated
Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, as well as the labor movement,
Granger movement, progressive movement and more” (2)
It is from the well of this deep American tradition that
reformers have gathered and organized to employ government to reign
in on the abuses of the marketplace and the oligarchies it inevitably
produces.
The question has been asked in these columns and
elsewhere: why haven't we adequately addressed the current obscenity
wherein a handful of Americans have as much personal wealth as half
the country? The answer is that it isn't that we aren't aware of it,
it is that we have been stripped of our ability—much as many state
governments are now being stripped of the ability to measure and
report on environmental damage—to measure and report on it. This
leaves the critics with the ability to call attention to the problem,
but only vaguely.
When Obama was elected, the Justice Department announced
that it was about to further monitor the number of hate crimes
committed annually. The Rescumlickans cried foul and squashed the
effort. The slack was taken up by the Southern Poverty Law Center
which now collects such data, and it is now the principle source of
information, not the Department of Justice, to which one turns in
order to understand the seriousness and the extent of the problem.
As with the Southern Poverty Law Center on hate crimes,
an organization called the Open Markets Institute has begun
gathering data on the level of the monopolization of the American
economy. Citing mergers, and network effects wherein one is
basically forced to use a service—think Microsoft or Facebook—the
institute has produced a graph which, according to Leonhardt, if
anything understates the problem.
The chart doesn't cover the entire economy, it is a
preliminary report covering 25 industries. The markets of all but
four have, in the last 11-16 years, have become decidedly more
concentrated. For instance two companies which controlled in the
early 2000's roughly 42% of the Home Improvement market, controls 80
percent of that market today. In shipbuilding the control of the two
largest companies went from about 23% up to around 61%; the two
largest companies dominating the Private Prison market jumped from
19-53%. And so it goes.
Previously, in our history, we would have long since
seen a vigorous anti-trust action taken by the Federal Government
enforcing laws that have been on the books since the first Gilded
Age, laws that were passed in the last quarter of the Nineteenth
Century
Previously, this has not been a partisan issue as both
parties, and several third parties, have rallied to the cause. The
Republicans passed the original anti-trust laws and enforced them
under T.R. The Democrats immediately picked up the 'big stick' and
enforced the law with greater vigor under Wilson a century ago. The
law was enforced throughout most of the twentieth century, with even
Nixon completing a successful prosecution of AT&T begun under the
Johnson Administration. Then came the actor from California enabled
by a Democratic Congress that would not confront the Republicans on
economic issues.
Today it is not a partisan issue either as both parties,
Democratic and Republican blithely ignore the law as capital
continues, unimpeded, to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands.
As noted earlier in these columns, this constitutes a
threat for such concentrations kill not only the entrepreneurial
spirit but the very republic that depends upon this spirit to ensure
a certain egalitarian distribution of wealth and opportunity. In its
absence, one is presented with an oligopoly—wealth concentrated in
few hands—with controls the polity much as they control the markets
from which they spring. This is a principle as old as Aristotle who
was, in a word, present at the creation of Democracy. It is why the
Athenians formed a Democracy in the first place. It is, therefore,
not only right and just to discuss the redistribution of wealth but
to do so as a democratic principle in defense of the Republic. To
oppose redistribution is, therefore, not only undemocratic and a
threat to the republic, it is Un-American.
If you are in doubt, consult the patriots who converged
in Boston Harbor and set spark to revolution; a revolution that, in
turn, gave birth to a republic.
___________________
- See Leonhardt, David. “The Monopolization of America” The New York Times. Monday, November 26, 2018. Page A23.
- Ibid.
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