1. While people are thinking about AT&T and Time Warner, I want to introduce an old antitrust idea. I call it #ConcentrationCreep.
2. The idea is that Bigness Begets Bigness. So CVS is thinking of buying Aetna as a response to Amazon's size and power. Get bigger or die. #ConcentrationCreep
3. Concentrations in one area cause defensive concentrations in other areas. This is the idea behind #ConcentrationCreep. And it's happening all over.
4. Doctors can't make it on their own bc of giant health insurers. So they join giant doctor practices. Giant insurers merge to fight giant hospital systems. Etc.
5. That's essentially the rationale behind AT&T-Time Warner. Get bigger to face the goliaths Google, Facebook, and Amazon. #ConcentrationCreep
6. #ConcentrationCreep is an old idea. Clayton Act was designed to hit monopolization in its incipiency to stop it. John Kenneth Galbraith named it 'countervailing power', though his notion was very poorly thought out.
7. Even back in 1888, Edward Bellamy wrote a utopian novel in which One Big Trust came to rule the country, and was nationalized to create a socialist paradise.
8. Point is, bigness begets bigness. That is #ConcentrationCreep. It is incredibly dangerous bc we wind up living in a nightmare between giant bureaucracies.
9. There are two ways to address #ConcentrationCreep. One is through politics, a campaign to deconcentrate power. Two is through social collapse.
10. Because a society of bigness is a Sovietized society with less resiliency, many single points of failure, and no feedback loops to address vulnerabilities.
11. Reducing #ConcentrationCreep through politics is not that hard. For instance, the AT&T-Time Warner merger challenge has thrown other deals into jeopardy. ft.com/content/e4505b…
12. Rolling back concentration in one sector through politics makes it easier to roll it back in other sectors. And this is not a left or right thing.
13. Makan Delrahim is Trump's AAG on antitrust. So far he's much more aggressive on concentration than any AAG in decades. Meanwhile the pro-monopoly left can't help but embrace AT&T.
14. Trump's autocratic bossing around of CNN is worrisome, but equally worrisome is the ridiculous PR job AT&T has used to lie about what's actually going on.
15. If AT&T and Time Warner goes through without a real challenge, then we will see #ConcentrationCreep accelerate everywhere. Welcome to Krispy-CVS-Aetna-Pfizer-Kreme.
16. And that means lots of single points of failure and no resiliency and a Soviet-ized economy. Which leads to... collapse. You can already see the outlines of this.
17. The Oxycontin epidemic is partially a result of concentration in health care. Some of our institutions are so sclerotic we can't stop them from mass negligent homicide.
18. But it can get much much worse. The fall of the Soviet Union saw a radical drop in life spans for Russian men. So anyway. Let's stop #ConcentrationCreep. That is all.
