The whole justification for modern corporate capitalism can be summed up in a sentence; "it creates a free market environment where competition spurs excellence."
That's fine in theory, but where the rubber hits the road you always see capitalists trying to merge into entities that are not just too big to fail, but too big to compete with. Whether they buy out anyone who challenges them, as for example Microsoft has always done, or collude with them and form a cartel, as you see in the oil and health insurance industries, the result is the same. No competition. No free market. Prices are fixed at artificially inflated values, and the public is screwed. As the saying goes; "in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice they are quite different."
Even Adam Smith, who is often cited as the champion of the free market, warned about this.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
-- Adam Smith, 'The Wealth of Nations'
Commenting by HaloScan
