1. A major new study by @reed_showalter shows that monopolization likely drives political corruption. When industry concentration goes up, lobbying spend goes up. When it goes down, lobbying spend goes down. The link is eery. economicliberties.us/press-release/… 
2. The lesson from the paper is intuitive and obvious, but hadn't been proved before. "The bigger companies get, the more powerful they become." bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
3. @reed_showalter followed three different industries. Tech, oil and gas, and pharmaceuticals. He found a four year lag on lobbying spend linked to concentration. Basically when executives have to compete they focus on competing. When they have a monopoly they focus on politics.
4. Modern economists and antitrust establishment lawyers shy away from the very clear political goals of the antitrust laws, using the shield of 'consumer welfare' to frame the statutes as merely technocratic and about resource allocation. But of course, that's nonsense.
5. As @RrjohnR and a new generation of historians are exploring, the anti-monopoly tradition going back hundreds of years has always been explicitly about stopping domination of citizens by the powerful. That was the point of the Sherman Act.
6. So in a sense, what @reed_showalter did with this study is to show, in today's language, what the framers of the various antitrust statutes sought, and what today's antitrust battles really mean. It's about who governs. We the people, or big business.
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