I am a free marketeer.  I believe that the free market generally provides the best solutions to problems.  People will naturally spend their money in the ways that interest them, and in a competitive market, if a clientele is not being served, someone will come along and serve them.

Monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels are bad in a free market.  They choke people out and limit competition.  In the past, the US goverment has found it necessary to break up monopolies (Standard Oil, AT&T, Microsoft) for the benefit of the market.

Now we have entered a new age.

CEO’s are putting politics at the forefront of business.

Citigroup is restricting its clients on gun sales.

Bank of America wants its gun clients to be proactive for gun control.

Blackrock, the world’s largest investment firm, wanted to squeeze companies that sell guns over politics.

YouTube is banning gun videos.

Google banned gun results from its shopping searches.

The world is mad that Cambridge Analytica mined Facebook for data for Trump, but Facebook was happy to hand that same data over to Obama, because Facebook is partisan.  Facebook has been actively engaged in partisan altering of people’s news feeds.

These are all private companies.

Except…

Citigroup is America’s largest credit card backers with 17% of the market.

Bank of America is No. 4 with 10% of the market.

Google handles 67.6% of internet searches and 25% of all internet traffic.

Facebook is eating the internet.  Google and Facebook combined are responsible for 75% of directed internet traffic and dominate how people get their information.

So…

When a handful of mega companies worth billions and trillions of dollars, who control significant shares of the market start to play politics, is it time for them to be regulated by the government?

How does a startup take on 75% of the internet to add a diversity of opinion, especially when that 75% is united in political ideology?

How does a bank that 10 years ago got a $15 Billion taxpayer bailout get to turn it’s position as the largest credit card backing bank in America against the American people?

Maybe “too big to fail” should be “too big to play politics.”

If the banks I have accounts with won’t let me buy guns with my money than I want the goverment to kick their asses.

Personally, I think Mark Zuckerberg is a super villain, and would love nothing more for the DOJ to pound his balls into mush and put him in a federal prison.

(The Facebook business model is: create a site that pretends to be a social media site, but instead tricks people into dumping all there personal information on it, which Facebook searches through and sells the data to god-knows-who then blasts you with targeted marketing ads.)

This is the potential backlash I see from all of this.  Business plays the political game too hard and politicians decide they must be regulated.  You can’t “do the job that Congress won’t do” and think that people will let you get away with it.

Playing politics isn’t just bad for those companies or customers, it is bad for the whole US economy.

 

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By J. Kb

12 thoughts on “Progressive Robber Barons”
  1. Abandon face of books. Abandon goo-goo. All of that shit. I have one finger in that pie, and it’s a seldom- used second email account that I am gonna close. Let’s do it. You don’t need it. See how they like it.

        1. Mavidal1&Clockworkgemlin thank you will use duck duck go seams some people just can’t stay out of politics

    1. http://www.duckduckgo.com internet searches, been using it since 2011
      http://www.minds.com Facebook-like social media, signed up in 2016
      http://www.gab.ai Twitter-like social media, haven’t signed up yet
      http://www.bitchute.com video sharing, my entire next LP series will go there
      http://www.steemit.com Facebook-like social media, cryptocurrency-backed, haven’t signed up
      http://www.palemoon.org web browser, been using it since about 2009

      Microsoft is also all aboard the progressive bandwagon, by the way. In light of that:
      http://www.linuxmint.org Linux distro with a strong Windows resemblance. If you’re not a gamer, you won’t miss anything in Linux, and you’ll enjoy about a 20% performance boost, as well. With WINE, you’ll still be able to run most Windows software just fine.
      http://www.reactos.org Open-source, Windows binary-compatable operating system being built entirely from scratch. Currently only has 32-bit support, and is considered to be in early Alpha, “pre-usable” state, but the last 3 years have made enormous strides.

      This post is being made on Pale Moon, from a computer running Linux Mint.

  2. The only problem I have with this is that you’re asking for government take over of the internet and if there’s a single important lesson from recent history, it’s just how much the government sucks at anything other than killing people and breaking things .

    The credit card industry is already heavily regulated by the government and you can see right there how well that works for us, yet you think the same folks will make the Internet a bastion of freedom?

    I don’t even see how the gubmint breaking up those companies is positive.

    1. That’s my point. I’d rather not have the goverment regulate the internet. But if internet monopolies engage in political censorship, they are begging for political interference.

      What happens when Google, which handles almost 70% of searches, filters its algorithm so ONLY negative Trump results are found and anything pro Trump files to load on Chrome?

  3. I prefer to see the free market regulate the economy, with the government only becoming involved in the case of force or fraud. But when a company becomes so powerful that it becomes, de facto, a part of government, as far as I’m concerned they’re fair game for political action.

  4. The market will fix this, as the gun buying market is way too big for all the financial companies to drop it entirely.

    History is replete with examples of various cartels and governments trying to squeeze out a certain market, only to find that one or more groups is breaking ranks and making lots of money.

    The urge to Do Something Right Away is one we must fight- the worst legislation is passed under the urge to Do Something Right Away. That should be left to the Left.

    We like to think that these groups are fully devoted fanatics of the Leftist agenda, but do remember that their real devotion is making money. When the money starts to go down, changes will be quietly made.

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