Senator John Sherman of Ohio, stated, “If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life." In furtherance of this, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was passed into law. The impact of the Sherman Antitrust Act was to preclude monopolies of any sort, and in particular to preclude not only monopolies but conspiracies that would restrain trade and commerce by virtue of any market segment being dominated by any consortium of companies colliding together, or monopolistic in their form.
Incredibly, this law was put into effect, nearly 130 years ago, indicating that businesses even back then, clearly recognized that more profit and more control of trade and commerce would be in their hands if they had either monopoly control of such business to begin with, or by working in collision with other corporations, they could in effect, perform together as a monopoly and reap the immense benefits, thereof. The upshot, is that any segment of the business world effectively controlled by the very few, in which the citizens of this nation would be virtually compelled to do business with directly or indirectly, would by that lack of competition and viable alternatives, be able to extract more money from the populace, and therefore to enrich themselves at the expense of the public.
In today's world, never have so few had so much, signifying without even taking a cursory glance at the business world that the Sherman Antitrust Act is essentially null and void; and therefore the public at large are the losers, and demonstrating clearly that this country effectively is neither egalitarian nor fair. To make matters worse, the government, which in theory is of, for, and by the people, and hence is the last bastion to both protect as well as to augment benefits for the people, is for all intents and purposes working hand-in-glove with the largest corporate powers that the world has ever seen, to the detriment of the people.
In virtually any industry of note in America, today, the amount of competition is often minimal, in which there are, at best, a few corporate players at the very top that control well over 50 percent of the market share, and hence fundamentally have pricing and profit control of those markets. Further to the point, this government, seems to consistently rubberstamp the buying up of competitors and smaller innovators, by those behemoth corporations, so that these corporations are able to successfully year-by-year not only consolidate their power but to thereby increase it and to remain, quite significant.
All of this really signifies, that in a country that has no king that the American citizens of this nation, are effectively paying tribute day-by-day to those corporate kings that control the production, transportation, and sale of the most important products that this country manufactures and distributes. If, this country will not effectively bring to bear all of its available resources so as to break up these dangerous monopolies of commerce, then these gross disparities of wealth, resources, and influence will continue to favor just the few, at the expense of the many, and thereby subvert our citizenship by making those denizens of this great nation, mere feeble subjects to their corporate kings.