Margrethe Vestager Quotes
Markets, when left to themselves, can sort of slip into being just the private property of big businesses and cartels, meeting the needs of some businesses and not the needs of customers.
She was then the European Commissioner for Competition
Margrethe Vestager, "The new age of Corporate Monopolies" Ted Talk, New York City, 2017
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She was then the European Commissioner for Competition.
One irony that some critics of Murdoch’s enterprises make is that despite his personal views about monopoly his businesses try to attain and maintain monopoly status whenever it can.
Brandeis was U. S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, 1856-1941, who wrote that competition would control prices if only healthy competition could be maintained—the problem was resolved by both increasing competition and much more stringent regulation of corporations.
Collection of Spoken Words of the Prophet. Ironically, despite the reverence with which words of the Hadith are accorded in Islam, from time to time Muslim theologians and authorities have attempted to establish “fair prices” despite this free market view of the Prophet.
Here, an officer of a large corporation (Pittsburgh Plate Glass) makes the classic argument of large corporations about the anti-trust laws which prevent them from using their economic power to crush competition. The claim that the large corporations are at a disadvantage and handicapped in competing with small companies is easily refuted by the bankruptcy rate of small businesses which is large, and that of large corporations which is very small, and that of major monopolies which is virtually zero.
While this statement seems totally absurd to us today, at the time most politicians and judges believed it. Only the left wingers and the populists opposed the doctrine as well as most business owners who knew the truth but of course most preferred the have their own monopoly. One of the reasons the large American corporations did not want Jewish and Chinese immigrants is that those cultures supported highly competitive businesses and might give consumers a better deal or worse, their culture would argue for less monopoly and more competition. For more than half a century AT&T was given a monopoly over almost all telephone service in the United States. Finally the Federal Courts saw through the company propaganda, and ordered AT&T broken up. The “Baby Bells” have persuaded most state legislatures and regulatory bodies of this same argument, and almost every community of the United States has a monopoly on local wired local telephone service. The same is true about water and electricity and a great deal of American transportation. Every major company strives for as much of a monopolistic position the government will allow; some are overt like the electrical companies. Others are more subtle and use copyright and patents to be sure that there is no price or service competition. Fortunately, the high tech industry is to technologically competitive that prices have been have been going down constantly not like telephone and Internet connectivity, entertainment, education, and professional services.
Railroads and other large markets shared dominated by a few large corporations.
Margrethe Vestager is a Danish politician and European Commissioner in the Von der Leyen Commission, currently serving as Executive Vice President of the European Commission for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age since December 2019 and European Commissioner for Competition since 2014. Vestager is a member of the Danish Social Liberal Party, and of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE) on the European level.
