Dwain Northey (Gen X)

At some point in the early 20th century, the United States looked around at a handful of men quietly controlling entire industries and said, “You know what? Maybe this whole ‘one company owns everything’ thing isn’t great for anyone who isn’t that one company.” That realization didn’t come from abstract theory—it came from lived experience with monopolies that didn’t just dominate markets, they rigged them.

So along came laws like the Sherman Antitrust Act and later the Clayton Antitrust Act, and eventually high-profile trust-busting under figures like Theodore Roosevelt. The idea wasn’t complicated: markets only “work” if there’s actual competition. If one company controls everything—or if a few giant firms quietly agree not to compete—then the “free market” becomes more of a suggestion than a reality.

That’s why Standard Oil got broken up in 1911. It wasn’t because people suddenly developed a philosophical objection to oil. It was because Standard Oil had mastered the art of eliminating competition—buying it, crushing it, or undercutting it until it disappeared. Once that happens, prices stop being a result of competition and start being whatever the dominant player says they are.

Fast forward to today, and we hear a constant refrain: “Let the market decide.” It’s a nice slogan. Clean. Efficient. Almost comforting. The problem is that it assumes there is a market to decide anything.

Take airlines. Over the past few decades, mergers have turned what used to be a crowded field into a tight club dominated by a few major players like Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and United Airlines. On paper, that’s still “competition.” In practice, it often looks like a synchronized dance of pricing, fees, and shrinking seat sizes. Consumers don’t really choose between fundamentally different options—they choose between variations of the same experience at nearly the same price.

Or consider media. A handful of conglomerates like Comcast and The Walt Disney Company control vast swaths of what people watch, read, and listen to. When ownership consolidates at that scale, diversity of viewpoints and pricing competition tend to narrow. It’s not that consumers suddenly lost interest in variety—it’s that the system stopped offering it.

And then there’s oil, where giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron Corporation dominate production and refining. Again, technically there’s more than one company, but if a market shrinks to a small handful of massive players, the difference between “competition” and “coordination” can get uncomfortably thin.

This is where the contradiction starts to show. You can’t champion the purity of the free market while ignoring the conditions that make a market free in the first place. Competition isn’t some natural state that magically persists on its own—it requires rules, enforcement, and sometimes intervention. That was the entire lesson of the antitrust era.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: if two or three companies control an industry, consumers don’t have meaningful choice. They have the illusion of choice. And an illusion isn’t something you can “let decide” anything.

Price fixing doesn’t even have to happen in smoke-filled rooms anymore. It can emerge through parallel behavior, algorithmic pricing, or simply the mutual understanding that aggressive competition would hurt everyone involved. When the incentives line up, companies don’t need to conspire—they just need to recognize what’s profitable.

So when someone says, “Let the market decide,” the obvious follow-up question is: which market? The one we had in 1910 that required breaking up monopolies? Or the one we’re drifting toward now, where consolidation quietly rebuilds them under a different name?

The early 20th century wasn’t anti-business—it was anti-unaccountable power. It recognized that capitalism without competition isn’t really capitalism. It’s something closer to a controlled system where outcomes are determined by a few dominant players.

And that’s the irony. The same country that once aggressively dismantled monopolies in the name of protecting markets now often defends consolidation in the name of preserving them. Somewhere along the way, “free market” stopped meaning “many competitors” and started meaning “whatever large corporations happen to be doing at the moment.”

If history had a sense of humor, it would probably point out that we already ran this experiment once. We know how it ends.