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Re:Becoming a Steelworker Liberated Her, Then Her Job Moved ... by toyg on Saturday October 14, 2017 @05:30PM (#15474419)
> Why country? Why not state, county, city, neighborhood, or block?

You joke, but that's exactly what antitrust is about. When AT&T was broken up, dozens of flowers bloomed almost overnight. Unfortunately that was the also the apex of antitrust enforcement (certainly in the US and possibly worldwide).

In many ways, the ugly side of globalisation is often a failure to enforce real antitrust legislation: if a market has so few players that abandoning a location means losing a factory, then there should be space for antitrust action. You want a market so rabid that competitors would jump at the chance to take over an existing factory and already-skilled workforce.

Unfortunately it's also the sort of thing where nation-states rear their ugly heads, as they compete to establish their own champions. If I break my companies into smaller ones and you don't, your companies now have a powerful advantage when playing in my market, because they can exploit economies of scale that mine cannot. This has no solution unless we give more teeth to supranational bodies like the WTO, which nobody really wants to do, but it's probably the only way to save globalist capitalism from itself.

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