Hard for me to understand how the consumer was protected by preventing Amazon from acquiring them. Only for Chinese firm to get for cheap in bankruptcy. But maybe I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances
Possibly an unintended consequence. Those abound in our governing systems as you're rightfully complaining about.
On the other hand, competition is good for consumers and letting Microsoft and Amazon use unfair tactics to crush the competition or their large revenues to just buy up all competition isn't good either. That is part of the problem today in that practically every industry is a monopoly or near total monopoly (maybe there are 2-3 firms colluding). There are no incentives to innovate or keep prices competitive in such a gilded-age system. There was a reason we broke up all the robber barons. There is also the hazard when you have businesses that are so large that they effectively control everything and the government can no longer regulate them. High inflation is at least partly coming from this lack of competition. There is also the issue of the money supply where we degrade our currency to make it easier to service the debt. That is also a really big component here.
Not sure how you could construe U.S. anti-trust actions as socialist. They prevented Amazon from acquiring iRobot. That is government intervention in the free market, but that is not the same thing as socialism. In fact you could argue a socialist administration would have wanted the merger (large firms tend to make labor organizing more tractable since there is only one employer to negotiate with).
Khan had already accused them of abusing monopoly power and filed a lawsuit against them, and had a history of blocking acquisitions. At this time she also had a lawsuit in place seeking to undo the nearly decade old acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp.
The smart thing to do in that environment isn't to push the issue so that years later someone can't write that there wasn't an official challenge. It's to read the room and abandon the deal.
Couldn't you just blame any business non-decision on fear of regulation?
"We were prevented from building a proper Windows phone because we already had such large market share on desktop, and already had an anti-trust against us so our hands were tied"
The foundational minds in Capitalism called for the need for government controls on it to keep markets healthy. It is LITERALLY Capitalism to have government oversight and intervention.
> But maybe I’m not educated enough in socialism to understand the nuances
Socialism is when the government owns businesses or entire industries.
Regulation is when the government has rules that companies have to play by.
The FTC is involved in regulation, not socialism.
Not all anti-capitalist actions are socialism. Not all socialism is anticapitalist.
You can disagree with a lot of things that the US government did under Biden. None of them were socialism. The closest recent example we have of socialism is the US government taking a 10% ownership stake in Intel. Which happened under Trump.
The previous best examples were all during the fall-out of the great financial crisis as part of TARP.
In retrospect, I think TARP was ultimately a pretty capitalist-friendly form of socialism. I am less sure about the Intel stake.
