Six on "our" Economy: Inside the Poorest Towns in America; Visualizing The Meteoric Rise Of Cryptocurrency in the Past 5 Year
philip panaritis
"To begin with, we have to recognize that America is one of only two developed countries in the world that allows pharmaceutical companies to market directly to consumers. They take advantage of this by spending, collectively, $3 billion on advertising to convince Americans to convince their doctors that they have a health concern worth writing a prescription for.
But what about the flagrant conflicts of interest like the ones we described above? How can it be that corporations wield power equal to governments and owns both the means to make us sick and to cure us?
The answer is simple: America stopped enforcing antitrust laws some time ago.
Part of the reason is because nearly everything about commerce is vastly different than it was when anti-monopoly laws first hit our books. We didn’t envision a world where companies could grow so diversified in the products they sell. We wrote our laws to tackle monopolies within a single industry. We didn’t anticipate that a single company could dominate several very different sectors. Look at what happened to the stocks of supermarket companies after Amazon bought Whole Foods. That shouldn’t really be possible."
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