The state derives a lot of its power globally from wealth, influence, military power (funded by wealth). The state is only as powerful as it is - and only as capable as it is at promoting American interests in the world because it has many of the biggest winner-take-all corporations in its jurisdiction.
A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The meta as a state today is to cultivate as much wealth and power as possible by encouraging super corporations
Breaking these megacorps benefits little guys like you and me, but I doubt it benefits state power on the global stage
Considering google search became complete crap under monopoly conditions, absolutely yes.
While the google had to compete, they produced good things and innovated. Now they just focus on milking maximum from the monopoly
there could be more reason to argue it would absolutely be more secure—if any of these tech giants or one of the people inside were to sell us out it could be very very bad. if one or two out of twenty were to sell us out, the damage is much much less severe.
not to mention we’re significantly stronger as a country when we have diversity of ideas leading to diversity in innovation which the dominance from a tiny few just entirely undermines.
Look how the US is able to spread it’s culture everywhere, cut off regimes, debank people it doesn’t like, all by controlling a few choke points.
Look how China uses its corporations to increase state power. The US does the same but with a few more carrots (lucrative govt contracts).
A mega corp means you can do your coercion behind closed doors rather than with sweeping regulations
I genuinely struggle to think of a social ill we're currently facing that isn't down in one way or another to some mega-entity acting against the public interest with no fears of reprisal because it is "too big to fail."
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
The US has demonstrated thoroughly it cannot and is not interested in preventing the ascent of a Chinese superpower, simply from the fact that, if you believe them at face value, the current ruling party and administration are absolutely ripping the walls out from the U.S. Government largely to prevent that exact phenomenon, and have utterly failed to do so. And, in their ineptitude, have in fact both made the United States a global embarrassment and left tons of soft power just sitting on the damn table for China to pick up.
> A world where it breaks them up while China keeps them is probably a world where China is far more powerful than the US
... but we have a lot of these supposed super-corporations. The problem is the United States, contrary to the ramblings of numerous chronically online people, does not actually use it's authority. Those corporations are in fact far more worried about accessing China's market than ours, because we don't regulate and they do, and there's far more Chinese consumers than American ones.
Add to it America's consumers are already strip-mined to the studs and China's middle class is growing... I mean. It's just full steam ahead on American irrelevance.
I think the real lesson is that when you're the big player already benefiting from global free trade in virtually every single way, laying tariffs on everything and sabotaging foreign investment in your own country is... well. Fucking stupid?
Fact is when you scratch even fingernail deep on any of them you find the private sector, far more often than not. The welfare state is in tatters because numerous components of it have been privatized and are operated by contracted companies who are siphoning off substantial amounts of the utter pittance we dedicate to the problem itself, which means what gets to the people who need it is even more a pittance than it started as.
The houseless issue is perpetuated in part by local governments zoning restrictions and the myriad of issues around building them here, from supplies to labor availability, and also a substantial contributor is the fact that huge amounts of homes are being purchased by investment companies and hoarded either without people in them, or are rented out in which case worker's earned income is being siphoned off to those already far wealthier than they need to be.
Poor funding of schools is often due to a whole mess of factors relating both to how we as a society prioritize education (or don't, more often) and the fact that a school's funding is heavily dependent on property taxes around where it is operating, which means under served areas have less quality schools from the off, which means less educated people with less money to spend, which means less economic activity, which means less property taxes and so on and so forth.
And in all of these and many other problems you have the elephant in the room: lobbying. Corporations spend billions to lobby the government to do even less than it does about these and a bunch of other issues, chief among them to permit said corporations to hold more money, a solid portion of which can then be spent on yet more lobbying. And certainly the government and it's politicians aren't simply helpless patsies in that arrangement, I also would hold the people making the decisions to route that money far more responsible.
At a glance it seems this would only remain true so long as American interests and the interests of the corporation align. Which they do, up to a point.
The question then becomes where is the "triple point" between "A globally competitive USA", "Corporate oligarchy", and "Power to the people"? If such a balance can when exist
