If you attack size in general you avoid having to pick winners and losers and merely make a trade of giving up potential peak efficiency in exchange for avoiding potential peak abuse. I'd favor spinning out new ventures over conglomeration. Abuse comes in many forms; what our current market structure is bad at is preventing max efficiency from winning out over human considerations like workplace conditions.

A way to play with that balance in a still-market-based, evenly-applied way sounds very attractive.

Doing it preemptively, based on potential, has strong precedent in the US when applied to trying to restrict government power. Corporations today are large enough that we should start trying to restrict that sort of power in the same way.

I can’t imagine what this looks like if not the proven democratic socialism most of the western world has already agreed to.

There is no market measure for treating employees fairly; only social safety nets.

What would happen if we had aggressive progressively scaled corporate taxes based on some mix of employee count, revenue, or other measures of size? As a thought experiment (disregarding international complications, measuring problems, etc, for now), how many of the worst effects of capitalism are mitigated if every company has several direct competitors?

With enough participants in the market, you might have enough potential defectors to keep oligopolistic collusion down. Employees get better treatment because they have options. BATNA.

Inspired by stuff like https://slate.com/business/2018/01/a-new-theory-for-why-amer... - the recipe to extracting maximum profit is to pay as little as you can get away with while demanding as much as you can get away with and charge as much as you can get away with. Our current tooling is fairly bad at limiting that "what you can get away with" for corporations. So what pressures would change it?

Currently we tilt the playing field in favor of larger corporations, in addition to the natural inclination in many areas of economies of scale, with stuff like forced arbitration being allowed. "Should Amazon be broken up?" is just a small part of the "how do we make sure economic power is well-distributed instead of concentrated?"

Or do we think systems with too-big-to-fail players are a good thing?

How can a corporation whose raison d'être is profits be trusted with being in a monopolistic situation?

Sure Amazons power will evaporate as soon as it's abused just like Intels, Microsofts and Dow Chemicals. History tells us this isn't the case.

How can a government that has effectively unlimited power be trusted?

Because it is elected?

Elected yes - representative of the people no. By design - with both the electoral college for President and each state having two Senators, the desires of the less populous states are over represenrated in government. And those two parts of government are in control of deciding the third branch - the Supreme Court.

That's not even to mention how much regulatory power unelected officials in the beuracry has.

> I could murder someone quite easily. Do you put me in jail just in case?

Nope, you haven't. You have the potential to attack someone and hope they can't get away in time or protect themselves.

If you really wanted to get the ability to murder someone at your sole descision, you'd have to take someone hostage, plot a terrorist attack or build a nuke. All of which will instantly land you in jail.

In the same way, I think a monopolist should be regulated because basically the only thing stopping them tovdo harmful things is their own descision not to do so. A descision that could change for whatever reasons.