by Recent economic research establishes that the United States suffers from a growing market power problem. Market power, often referred to as monopoly power, means consumers pay more for the goods and services they need. Workers earn less. Small businesses have a harder time succeeding. Innovation slows. Market power exacerbates wealth inequality, too, because those who benefit from monopolies—the high-paid executives and stockholders of corporations—are wealthier, on average, than the consumers, workers, and small businesses who bear monopolies’ costs. U.S. antitrust laws, as interpreted and enforced today, are inadequate to confront and deter growing market power in the U.S. economy. To restore a fair and competitive market, we need legislation that strengthens the law and counters
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Recent economic research establishes that the United States suffers from a growing market power problem. Market power, often referred to as monopoly power, means consumers pay more for the goods and services they need. Workers earn less. Small businesses have a harder time succeeding. Innovation slows. Market power exacerbates wealth inequality, too, because those who benefit from monopolies—the high-paid executives and stockholders of corporations—are wealthier, on average, than the consumers, workers, and small businesses who bear monopolies’ costs.
U.S. antitrust laws, as interpreted and enforced today, are inadequate to confront and deter growing market power in the U.S. economy. To restore a fair and competitive market, we need legislation that strengthens the law and counters growing corporate power, enforcers who are willing to aggressively enforce laws, and increased fiscal resources to enforce the law.Workers getting paid less and consumers paying more than they would in a symmetrical market as a result of market power is rent extraction, in this case, monopoly-monopsony rent. The genuine economic meaning of "free market" is symmetrical market, aka perfect market. That is to say, in perfect markets having no asymmetry, prices reflect costs vertically and horizontally, and there is no opportunity to extract economic rent.
Econ 101 is based on the ideal of a perfect market, which does not exist in the real world owing to many factors, one of the primary ones being class structure and power in bourgeois liberalism, where "capital" (property ownership) is privileged. The result is structural inequality of power, income and wealth, skewing economic distribution toward the top. It is as endemic to "capitalism" as business and financial cycles.
WCEG — The Equitablog
See also
Neoclassical economics deconstructed. The foundation turns out to be power rather than supply and demand as claimed.
Real-World Economics Review Blog
Supply and demand deconstructed