The Not-So-Free Market Eating Your Paycheck | Monologue Monday

Most Americans think they live in a free market.

But if that's true, why do we keep ending up with fewer airlines, fewer hospitals, fewer pharmacies, fewer banks, fewer food processors, and fewer choices?

In this episode of Common Sense with Chad Law, we take a hard look at the forgotten conservative history of antitrust, trustbusting, and competition. From Theodore Roosevelt and Standard Oil to Reagan and AT&T, we explore why conservatives once saw concentrated corporate power as a threat—and why that conversation disappeared.

We'll break down how government intervention, regulation, consolidation, lobbying, and market concentration created an economy where giant corporations increasingly dominate healthcare, technology, food, airlines, banking, and communications.

This isn't an argument against capitalism.

It's an argument for competition.

Because capitalism isn't giant corporations.

Capitalism is the freedom to take your business somewhere else.

Topics include:

• Standard Oil
• AT&T and the Reagan breakup
• Google's dominance
• Healthcare consolidation
• PBMs and prescription drug costs
• Food industry concentration
• Defense contractor consolidation
• Government regulation and barriers to entry
• Competition vs competitors
• Why your paycheck doesn't go as far as it used to

If you enjoy thoughtful conversations about economics, politics, public policy, and common sense solutions, subscribe and share the show.

00:00 The Illusion of Monopolies
00:27 The Burden of Regulation
06:20 The Myth of Free Markets
11:48 The Conservative Legacy of Antitrust
20:00 Lessons from History: Standard Oil and AT&T
26:45 The Pressure of Competition in a Free Market
28:27 The Role of Conservatives in Trustbusting
28:52 Government Intervention and Market Consequences
31:01 The Cycle of Government Fixes and Market Distortion
32:53 The Impact of Regulations on Small Businesses
36:17 The Creation of Monopolies through Government Meddling
38:07 The Loop of Market Concentration and Political Influence
41:12 The Healthcare Market and Its Concentration
46:05 The Modern Monopoly: Google and Its Influence
51:42 Concentration in the Food Industry
57:38 The Squeeze on Farmers and Consumers
59:34 The Velvet Rope of the Food Market
01:00:11 The Role of Middlemen in Healthcare
01:01:33 The Airline Industry's Struggles
01:03:25 Concentration of Power Across Industries
01:04:10 The Confusion of Antitrust Principles
01:07:46 The Shift from Building to Bargaining
01:11:12 The Path to Restoring Competition
01:12:19 Lessons from History: The Breakup of Ma Bell
01:14:09 The Call to Action for Competition

Transcript

Chadq: greatest trick monopolies ever pulled wasn't convincing Democrats they were necessary, it was convincing conservatism Mm. Woo, let's go. The greatest trick monopolies ever pulled wasn't convincing Democrats they were necessary, it was convincing conservatism Cool. The greatest trick monopolies ever pulled wasn't convincing Democrats they were necessary, it was convincing conservativism that they were. I why can't I say this? The greatest trick monopolies ever pulled wasn't convincing Democrats they were necessary, it was convincing conservatives they were capitalism. Think about how brilliant that is. The people who were supposed to defend competition end up defending. The greatest trick monopolies ever pulled wasn't convincing Democrats they were necessary, no. It was convincing conservatives they were capitalism. Think about how brilliant that is. The people who were supposed to defend competition ended up defending the biggest competitors. The people who built the hammer stopped swinging it, and somewhere along the way, protecting giant corporations became confused with protecting free markets. Those are not the same thing. Not even close. Imagine a football league where one team bought all the best players, bought all the stadiums, bought all the television rights, bought all the referees, and spent 20 years making sure no new team could enter the league. At some point, that's not competition anymore. That's theater. And the crazy part? We're still buying tickets, we're still buying jerseys, we're still cheering for a game that ended years ago. That's what a monopoly looks like. Not victory, an empty stadium. Everybody looks at a monopoly and says, there's a problem, maybe. But what if but what if that's backwards? What if the monopoly isn't the disease? What if the monopoly is the scar? Think about scar tissue. By the time you can see the scar, the injury already happened years ago, maybe even decades ago. The monopoly is just the thing you can finally see. The real question is: what caused the wound? Here's a simple test. Name Google's biggest competitor. Seriously, say it out loud. Most people can't. And that should bother you. Not because Google is evil, because when a company becomes the default answer for an entire activity, you're no longer talking about a product. You're talking about infrastructure. And that's a very different conversation. Healthcare is the only thing you buy where nobody can tell you what it costs. Think about how insane that is. You can find the exact price of a used truck three states away at two in the morning. But try finding out what a hospital procedure costs before you get it. Good luck. The bill shows up months later. The codes make no sense, the fees make no sense, and somehow we've accepted this as normal. Normal and healthy are not always the same thing. You want to know who a regulation really helps? Don't read the press release. Watch who lobbies for it. Because a shocking amount of time, it's the giant corporations themselves. And people always ask why would a company want more regulation? Easy. Because they can afford it. The startup can't. The small business can't. The future competitor can't. The burden isn't the side effect, the burden is the whole point. If you're under 40, this sounds fake. There was a time when you didn't own your phone. You rented it from the phone company every month. You couldn't buy a better phone. You couldn't plug in a different phone. You used the one they gave you because they owned the entire system. Then the monopoly got broken up, competition came back, and eventually that competition helped create the smartphone sitting in your hand right now. Competition didn't kill innovation. Competition created it. One of the craziest stories in the entire episode is true. In the 1990s, the Pentagon literally sat defense contractors down for a dinner and told them to merge. And when they did, we went from fifty-one major defense contractors to five. Five. And people look at the result and call it the free market. No, that's not the free market. That's the seating chart. Four companies control about 85% of beef in America. And here's the crazy part the rancher gets paid less. You pay more at the exact same time. How is that even possible? Because when there are only a handful of buyers and a handful of sellers, the money gets trapped in the middle. And the people creating the product don't win, the people buying the product don't win, the middle wins every time. Folks, everybody hates bad referees. I get it, so do I. But somewhere along the way, we decided the solution to bad referees was no referees. And then we act shocked when the biggest team on the field started doing whatever it wanted: buying competitors, changing rules, controlling the game. A bad referee is a problem. No referee is a different problem. And America apparently forgot the difference. ⁓ my god. Let's play a game. Open your banking app. Look at what left your account last month. Not the fun stuff, not the dinners out, not the thing you actually wanted to buy, the boring stuff. The stuff you didn't choose. The stuff that just leaves every month, like clockwork, like gravity. The health insurance premium that went up again. Same plan, same doctor, same everything, just more. They didn't add a benefit. They didn't call to explain. The number just quietly got bigger, the way it does every year, and you paid it the way you do every year. The prescription that costs what it costs, because reasons, nobody can tell you why. The pharmacist can't tell you why. You hand over the card and brace for the impact and hope today's the cheap month. The phone bill, the internet bill, the streaming service that used to be one service, remember that? One. Now it's eight. And every single one of them found a way to put ads back in and then charge you extra to take ads back out. You are now paying a monthly fee to undo the thing they did the service you were already paying for. Groceries. You bought the same cart you always buy, same list, same brands, and you handed over forty more dollars and somehow walked out with fewer bags. You stood in the parking lot and did the math twice because it didn't make sense the first time. The concert ticket. Where the ticket was 80 bucks and the fees were 60. Convenience fee, service fee, facility fee. Convenient for who? And just so you know, a jury in this country just looked at the company doing that, Ticketmaster, and called it an illegal monopoly out loud on the record. We'll come back to that one. And the airline, well, you'd fly the cheap one, except the cheap one doesn't exist anymore. It just vanished. One day there were big yellow planes sitting on the tarmac. The next day there weren't gone. An entire airline. An airline that millions of you flew last year just evaporated, and your cheap option evaporated with it. So you do what every single one of us does. You ask why. And America has a whole vending machine of answers ready to go. Push a button, pick your villain. It's inflation. It's tariffs. It's the billionaires. It's corporate greed. It's your taxes. It's the supply chain, still apparently four years later, the supply chain, that poor supply chain that's been recovering longer than most marriages last. My favorite, it's climate change. Pick one. Pick all of them. There's a cable channel, a podcast, and an uncle at every Thanksgiving for every single one of them. And here's the thing: some of those answers aren't even wrong. There's a little truth in a bunch of them. That's exactly why this works. That's why you never get to the bottom of it. You're so busy arguing about which villain it is, you never stop to ask if you're even looking in the right direction. Because here's the thing that keeps bugging me: the thing I can't shake. Every one of those answers, every single one, is about something happening to the market from the outside: a shock, a villain, a weather event that blew in and made your life expensive. But what if it's not coming from the outside? What if life keeps getting more expensive? Not because of something happening to the free market. But because of something that happened to the free market a long time ago, quietly, on purpose, even, while all of us were busy in the parking lot doing the math twice, arguing about everything else. We've been standing out in the rain for years now, blaming the weather, cursing the sky. What if the problem was never the weather? What if the problem was the building we're standing in the whole time? Tonight, we go look at the building. Tonight we'll go look at the building. I'm Chad Law, the last gay conservative, America's binary brother, the common sense extremist living in radical reality, spreading truth on the only rainbow that matters: the red, white, and blue rainbow, hoping to restore common sense in the American household one conversation at a time. And America, this is common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts so you don't have to ruin another Thanksgiving. The show for the other 80% of Americans, the people busy raising families, building businesses, paying taxes, coaching Little League, serving their communities, and wondering when common sense became controversial. You see, while cable news, political consultants, professional activists, and social media outrage merchants spend all day arguing about the loudest 20% of the population. We focus on the people who actually keep America running. This is the big tent, the shelter for the politically homeless, the politically exhausted, the politically independent, and the common sense conservatives tired of being told they have to choose between two bad ideas. Here, reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, common sense matters. So welcome home. Here's what every single one of us grew up believing. We live in a free market, the greatest one in human history. And the deal is simple. It's beautiful, actually. You want something, somebody competes to sell it to you. Somebody else competes to sell it to you cheaper or better or faster. And that competition, that constant fight over you, keeps every one of them honest. Nobody gets to take you for granted. Because if they do, you walk. You take your money down the street. That's the deal. That is the American deal. It's a beautiful deal. But let me ask you something. Is it actually free anymore? Because when you go look something up, you don't search the internet, you Google it. Google is a verb now. We don't even have a word for the competitors because for most of you, there functionally aren't any. When you get sick, There's a real good chance your hospital, the doctor you see inside it, and the company that decides what your prescription costs all quietly answer to the same small handful of corporations. The beef in your freezer ran through four companies, four, before it ever reached your cart. Your internet at home? You've got one real choice. Maybe two if you're lucky and you live in the right zip code. And the airlines just quietly went from a whole crowded sky full of competitors down to four carriers that run 80% of it. Now hear me clearly, none of that is illegal. Now, hear me clearly. None of that is illegal. Not one bit. And noticing it doesn't make you a communist. It doesn't make you Elizabeth Warren. You're allowed to look. So look. Look at that firsthand and tell me with a straight face that it looks like a wide open, free, competitive market with a dozen hungry players all fighting over you. It does not. It looks like a few enormous players and a whole lot of you. It looks like a handful of giants who figured out a long time ago that they really don't have to fight over you anymore because where are you gonna go? And and here's where the whole thing gets strange. This is the part that genuinely keeps me up. Because there is one group in this country, one tribe, that used to absolutely lose its mind over exactly this. That used to stand up red in the face and say, concentrated power is dangerous. It doesn't matter if it's concentrated in government or concentrated in a corporation, power that big with no check on it is a threat. Keep the field open. And if someone gets so big the field closes behind them. Break them up. That group was conservatives. I'm not kidding you. I'm not doing a bit. The American right used to hunt monopolies for sport. It was a point of pride. It was in the platform. And today, today, you just say the word antitrust at a conservative dinner table, and half the room looks at you like you just pitched a tent on Wall Street and started banging a drum. Today, break them up. Sounds like something the socialists say. Today, defending the biggest corporations in history of the planet has somehow become the conservative position. So what changed? That's the mystery. That's the whole show tonight. What happened? Did conservatives just abandon it? Did everyone wake up one Tuesday morning and collectively decide monopolies were okay now? Or and I want you to really stay with me here because this is the thread we're gonna pull on tonight. Did the monopolies pull off something a whole lot smarter than that? Did they manage to convince conservatives, the free market people, the competition people, that defending them, the giants, was exactly the same thing as defending capitalism? That going to bat for the five biggest companies on earth was somehow the same as going to bat for the corner store and the startup and the guy with a better idea in his garage? Because those are not the same thing. They were never the same thing, in a lot of cases they were opposites. And the day we started treating them like they were the same thing is right around the day your paycheck started quietly disappearing in ways nobody could quite explain to you. So here's where we're going tonight. First, I'm gonna show you what this whole idea, busting up concentrated power to protect the free market, didn't come from the left, it came from the right. It's a conservative inheritance we forgot we have. Then I'm gonna show you how we got there. How we quietly planned our way into a market this concentrated and barely even noticed it happening. How concentration buys political power, and how that political power turns right back around and protects the concentration that bought it. Then we're gonna walk through the giants, the real ones, the ones sitting on your wallet tonight, in your search bar, your hospital, your pharmacy, your grocery store, your living room, and the sky over your head. And then, because I don't just believe in making you mad and sending you to bed, we're gonna talk about the fix, the real one, the honest, common sense, conservative fix. Why the people who once fought this hardest are the exact people who you have to remember now. We've spent years out in the rain blaming the weather. Tonight we're going to look at the building. Okay, so I say the word antitrust, and I know. I know exactly what just happened in your head. I watched it happen from here. You pictured Elizabeth Warren, you pictured Lena Khan, you pictured some 34-year-old regulator with a studio apartment, a tote bag, and a vendetta standing at a podium explaining to you why a company that makes something you actually like and use every day is somehow secretly a threat to democracy itself. And your whole body just went, ugh. I get it. I really genuinely do. Because for most of your adult life, antitrust has been a word that comes out of the mouths of the very specific kind of person. People who never built anything, never made payroll, never had to look at 12 employees three days before Christmas and figure out how everybody's getting paid. People who have signed the back of a whole lot of checks and never once in the front. People who look at a successful American company the way a cat looks at a bird on the windowsill. So when one of those people says we should break them up. Your gut does exactly what it's trained to do. It says, here we go, here comes more government, more control, more bureaucrats deciding they know your business better than you do, more punishing people for unforbiv for unforgivable crime of winning. More punishing people for the unforgivable crime of winning. And I want to say something to that reaction very clearly before we go one inch further. That reaction is not dumb. That reaction is earned. You did not invent that suspicion out of nowhere. You watch these people abuse this stuff for years. You watch them use words like fairness and equity as a crowbar. So your guard goes up. Good. Keep your guard up. It's a healthy instinct and it saves you from a lot of nonsense. So hold on to that feeling genuinely because here's the twist and it's a big one. You are completely right about the people who hijacked the word. You've just got the history of the word exactly perfectly backwards. Here's the part no one ever told you, the part they leave out. Antitrust is not some progressive invention. The left did not dream this up in a faculty lounge. The left didn't build this thing at all. The right did. I'm serious, dead serious. The idea of busting up monopolies in this country is a Republican family heirloom. It's in the attic with the good China. The single biggest trust buster in the history of the United States was not Bernie Sanders. It was not FDR, it was Theodore Roosevelt, Republican. Rough rider, charge up San Juan Hill, face carved into an actual mountain Republican. And the law, Teddy swung like a hammer, the Sherman Antitrust Act. That was written by a Republican senator, John Sherman of Ohio, and signed into law by a Republican president. A full decade before Roosevelt ever got his hands on it. This was Republican from the jump. Republican idea, Republican pen, Republican signature, Republican enforcer. Now, I'm gonna be straight with you because I always am. And because I'm not some guy in the comments. Now, I'm gonna be straight with you because I always am. And because if not, some guy in the comments is gonna, well, actually, me all the way into the sea. Now, was Teddy Roosevelt a conservative in the way you define one today? Honestly, no, not really. He was his own strange mustachioed larger than life animal. Some of what he believed would line right up with you, and some of it would give a modern Republican a full body stroke at the dinner table. I'm not gonna stand here and pretend Teddy was handing out pocket constitutions at a turning point conference. He wasn't. But here's what matters. Here's the part you cannot skip past. The party of business, the party of free market, the party of leave the job creators alone. That party looked at monopolies of the day, the great trusts, the most powerful corporations that had ever existed on American soil, and they did not shrug and say, well, they won fair and square, hands off. They looked at that concentrated power and said, This is dangerous. This has gotten too big. Break it up. And they did not think for one second that they were attacking capitalism. They thought they were saving it. They thought they were rescuing the free market from the handful of giants who were about to strangle it in the crib. And to understand why they'd think that, why the pro business party would turn around and break up the biggest businesses in the country, you have to understand what they were actually trying to protect. Because it wasn't the companies, and it sure wasn't the economy as some big abstract thing. It was one specific thing. And once you see it, what's the name of the game? You can't stop seeing it. Because this right here is where everyone gets turned around. This is the wrong turn that the entire country took. Antitrust was never about punishing success. It was never about redistributing wealth. It was never about equity or fairness or everybody gets a juice box and a trophy sense. That's the hijacked version, the bumper sticker. The other team slapped on it for 60 years. The original thing, the thing was just about one word. One. Competition. That's it. That's the whole ball game. That's the beating heart of the entire free market. And we forgot it. And I need you to lock into a distinction with me right now. Grab it with both hands because it is, hands down, the single most important thing I'm going to say to you all night. It is the key that unlocks every other room in this house. Everything that's gone wrong, everything eating your paycheck, all of it traces back to people losing this one distinction. Here it is. There is a difference, a massive canyon size difference between protecting competition and protecting competitors. Say it back to me in your head. Competition versus competitors. One letter, basically, completely different universe. Let me show you what I mean, and I'm gonna use the simplest thing in the world sports. Picture a referee, a good one. Picture a referee, a good one, the best ref you can imagine. What does that ref actually want? Does he care who wins the game? No. He genuinely, truly does not care whether the home team or the visitors walk out of there with the W. It's not his job. And a good one doesn't even let himself have a rooting interest. He cares about exactly one thing: that the game is fair. Nobody's holding, nobody's stuck a 12th man onto the field. Nobody paid off the guy running the clock. He protects the game itself, the contest, not a team, never a team. That is protecting competition. You keep the field level, you keep the rules honest, you make sure everyone plays by the same set of whistles. And then, and this is the beautiful part, whoever is actually best wins. Could be the favorite, could be the underdog nobody saw coming. The ref doesn't know and doesn't care. May the best team win. That's the whole point. That's capitalism with the wrapper off. Now, protecting competitors? That is an entirely different animal. That's when the referee strolls onto the field, looks around, decides he personally likes the team in blue. Maybe they're his hometown, maybe they slipped him something, and he starts throwing flags every single time the other guys get anywhere close to scoring. He's not keeping the game fair anymore. He's not protecting the contest. He is reaching down and picking the winner. He's decided how it ends before they've played it. And that second thing, that's the thing you hate. And you are right to hate it with everything in you. When government walks onto the field and starts picking winners and losers, bailing out its friends, burying its enemies, deciding which comp deciding which companies get to live and which ones get regulated into the grave, that is not capitalism. That is a rigged game with extra paperwork. That's the thing your gut was warning about you. That's the thing your gut was warning you about back at the top of this segment. Your instincts were good. They were just pointed at the wrong target. Because here's the trick that got pulled on us. Here's the sleight of hand. Somewhere along the way, and we'll get into exactly when, we let these two completely different things get blended together into one. We let somebody convince us that any referee on the field at all for any reason, even just to stop the obvious cheating, must secretly be rigging the game. So we did the logical thing. We fired the ref. We didn't fire the bad ref and hire a good one. We looked at a couple of bad calls and we decided the answer was no referee at all. We pulled him off the field entirely, threw his whistle in the parking lot, and called it freedom. And then we acted absolutely shocked, shocked, when the biggest, richest, strongest team on the field just started doing whatever it wanted. Buying up every other team, signing every good player so nobody else could have them, changing the rules in the locker room at halftime. Until one day you look up and there's no game left to watch. Just one team running up the score in an empty stadium while you, you in the cheap seats, keep paying more every single year for the season tickets. And the truly insane part, we still show up. We still buy the jersey. We're out here fiercely loyal to a team that stopped trying to win sometime around nineteen eighty seven. That's us. That's the American consumer. Cheering in an empty stadium for a final score that was decided before we parked the car. Protecting competition keeps the game alive and honest and worth watching. Protecting competitors kills it. And firing the referee because they blew a couple of calls, that doesn't give you freedom. That never gave you freedom. That just quietly hands the entire league forever to ⁓ to whoever was already winning the day you walked off. That never gave you freedom. That just quietly hands the entire league forever to whoever was already winning the day you walked off. That's it. So hold that picture in your head. The ref, the empty stadium. I want you to lock it in. Because now I want to show you the two times in American history the right looked at that empty stadium, understood exactly what they were seeing, and got it exactly beautifully right. first one is the big obvious one, Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller. And listen to me carefully because this matters and this is where people get it wrong. And I'm not about to stand up here and turn this man into a cartoon villain twirling a mustache. I won't do it. Rockefeller was a genuine genius. He outworked everybody. He outthought everybody. He built something the world had never seen before and figured out how to make it run with a kind of ruthless efficiency that frankly dragged the entire country into the modern age. He actually drove the price of kerosene down, way down, for regular working families, made light affordable for people who'd lived their whole lives going to bed at sundown. In a lot of ways, the man was exactly the kind of builder this country should be putting on a poster. I mean every word of that. So get this through your head because the hijackers want you to believe the opposite. This was never about Rockefeller being rich. Being rich is not the crime. Building something great. Is not the crime. Let me say it as plainly as I possibly can. The problem was never ever that Rockefeller won. The problem was that he won so completely, so totally, that there was no game left for anyone else to play. At the peak, Standard Oil controlled somewhere around 90% of the oil in the United States of America. 90%. And here's what happens at 90%. This is the thing. At 90%, you stop having to compete. You don't have to build a better product anymore. You don't have to earn the next customer or the next one or worry about losing them because where exactly is that customer gonna go? You are the market now. You're not a company in the market. You are the market. And at that point, you can squeeze the little refiner of business. You can lean on the railroads to give you secret rates nobody else can get. You can set the price wherever you feel like setting it that particular morning. And the customer and the supplier and the worker and the guy with the better idea, they all just take it. Because there's no door left for them to walk out of. That is the moment the Republicans stepped in. And I want you to hear why, because it's the whole point. They didn't step in because Rockefeller was successful. They stepped in because the door had slammed shut behind him. Because the next Rockefeller, the better one, the kid with the smarter idea tinkering in a barn in Ohio, was never ever getting through that door. The ladder had been pulled up. The contest was over. And a contest that's permanently over isn't a free market anymore. It's just a king with a logo. So in 1911, they broke it up. They took Standard Oil and they cracked it into a bunch of separate companies, and they made those companies do the one thing the giant had stopped doing: compete with each other. And here's the punchline. Here's the part that this is socialism. Crowd never wants to finish the story with: it didn't wreck the industry. It didn't punish innovation. It didn't send America back into the dark ages. The pieces went out and they competed. And a couple of those very pieces grew into companies whose names you would still recognize on a highway sign today. You put their gas in your car. Breaking up the monopoly did not kill the market. It actually brought the market back to life. Now the second one, and this is the one I really, really want the younger folks in the audience to lean in for, because if you're under forty, you do not remember this, you have never lived in this world, and I promise you it's going to sound like I'm making it up for a bit. There was a time in this country, not ancient history. Your parents lived in it. Maybe you did when one company owned the telephone. And I don't mean most of the phone market. I don't mean a dominant share. I mean the telephone, the entire thing. A single company, ATT. They call their Ma Belle like she was a person, because in a way she kind of was. She was in everybody's house. And I mean she owned it. Here is the part that genuinely breaks people's brains when they hear it for the first time. So let it land. You did not own your own telephone. You rented it from the phone company every month. The actual physical phone hanging in your kitchen wall did not belong to you. It belonged to them. And you were not allowed to. It was against the rules to go out and buy your own phone, a better phone, a cooler phone, and plug it into your own wall in your own house that you paid for. Couldn't do it. Against Ma Bell's rules, you paid them month after month, year after year, for the privilege of using a phone they owned sitting in a house you owned. And long distance, ⁓ long distance was an event. Calling your grandmother two states over cost real actual money by the minute. People scheduled it. There was an entire ritual around it. You called after a certain hour at night when the rate finally dropped, you kept it short, and somewhere around minute four, somebody's saying, Okay, okay, this is long distance. I gotta go, gotta go. ⁓ And you hung up because Ma Bell set the price, and you had exactly one option, which, say it with me, is just a fancy way of saying you had no option at all. And then in the early 1980s, the United States government broke her up, took Ma Bell, and split her into pieces. We called them baby bells, and forced the American telephone business to do the thing it had not done in its living memory. Compete for you. ⁓ and what happened? What happened when you forced competition back into a market that you had forgotten the word? Long distance prices fell off a cliff. Off a cliff. The thing you used to schedule on ration became something you stopped even thinking about. And then, because now these companies actually had to fight for you, which means they had to innovate, which means they had to come up with the next thing before the other guy did, that cracked open. Suddenly, competitive telephone industry went on to hand us the cell phone and then the smartphone. A little glass rectangle that's in very possibly your hand right now as I'm talking. I want you to really truly sit in that for a second because it's not a small thing. The phone you might be listening to me on this very second, there is a real serious grown-up argument that it exists in your pocket because someone back then had the nerve to break up a monopoly. The single most useful object in your entire modern life came directly out of restoring competition to a market a giant had been sitting on for decades. One company owning the phone gave you a rented plastic box bolted to the wall and a bill you were not allowed to argue with. Competition gave you the entire world in your pocket for a fraction of the price. So here's the whole thing in one piece, the part to take home with you. We walk around, all of us, me included, for a long time, with this story burned into our heads. And the story goes: capitalism means big, successful companies, so hands off, leave them be. That's the free market. And government means regulation, interference, control, the boot on your neck. But that line, that border we drew in our heads, that was never where the line actually was. We drew it in the wrong place, and drawing it in the wrong place is costing you money every single month. Because capitalism is not big corporations, and capitalism is definitely not big government either. Strip the whole thing all the way down to the studs, knock off all the bumper stickers and the talking points, and capitalism is one thing. One competition. The freedom to take your business somewhere else, the or else. That constant, nagging, beautiful protective threat hanging over every single seller in the country. The threat that the moment you get lazy, the moment you get greedy, the moment you start taking your customer for granted and stop earning it, somebody hungrier comes along and eats your lunch. That is the engine. The pressure right there. The entire reason the free market works for you, the customer, instead of working for the guy who's already on top. But kill the competition, and you don't have capitalism anymore. You've just got a giant with a logo charging you whatever it wants. And a logo is not a free market. And the right, the people who say louder than anyone that they love the free market used to understand this in their bones down deep. They just didn't give speeches about it. They built the actual tools to protect it. And then they picked those tools up and used them. Teddy used them, they broke up standard oil, and the market got bigger. They broke up Ma Bell and the world ended up in your pocket. And every single time they did it, the same thing happened. The market came back stronger. Innovation came roaring back. And your life, the regular person's life, got better and, listen, cheaper. So here's the question: the one that should be sitting in your chest right now, itching as we head into the next segment. The one we are going to chase all the way down. If conservatives once understood this so completely, so deeply, if conservatives once understood this so completely, so deeply that they carved the lead trustbuster's face into the side of a mountain where it'll stare out over this country for the next 10,000 years, then why did they go so quiet? What happened? Because something happened, something specific, somebody got to them. And it's the reason, the actual traceable reason that your paycheck keeps vanishing into a market that stopped being free a long, long time ago. I'll show you. All right, let's pick the story right back where we left. So conservatives, the right, used to be the trustbusters, the party that broke up Standard Oil and watched the market come back stronger. The party that broke up Ma Bell and accidentally invented the future. The party that kept a referee on the field and understood in its bones that a referee is not the enemy of the game. He is the reason there is a game. And then, somewhere along the line, they went quiet. They put the whistle down. We walked off the field. And We are absolutely going to get to why they went quiet, who got to them and what the argument was, why it was actually pretty convincing. That's the whole stor that's a whole story of its own and it's coming. But first I want to point out something we already believed, you and me, something we agree on, so completely we don't even think about anymore. It's just furniture in the room. Conservatives do not trust central planning, right? That's not controversial here. We don't trust a room full of bureaucrats trying to run a hundred million person economy from behind a desk in Washington. We don't trust government picking winners and losers. We don't trust politicians steering whole industries towards whoever wrote the biggest check and showed up to the right fundraiser. That is not a hot take around here. That is a Tuesday. That's the air we breathe. And we know, we have said it for 50 straight years, that the second government reaches its hands into a market and starts rearranging the furniture, weird stuff starts happening. Stuff nobody voted for. Stuff nobody intended. Consequences spidering out in directions the people who passed the law never even imagined. We were right about that. The evidence is overwhelming. It's one of the truest things our side believes. So here's my question, and it's a real one. I'm not setting a trap. I'm genuinely asking you to follow the logic of your own belief. If we already know, know that government meddling creates giant cascade of unintended consequences. Then why are we so completely shocked when it turns out that one of those unintended consequences is a monopoly? Why do we do this? Why do we look at a market with three companies left standing in it, three, and instantly assume that's the natural, beautiful free market doing its thing when half the time, if you bother to look, government's fingerprints are all over it? We'll blame the government for everything else it touches: the DMV, the post office, the roads, the schools. But somehow when government touches a market and that market collapses down to a handful of untouchable giants, we got, ⁓ capitalism. No. Hang on. Why does our suspicion suddenly switch off at the exact moment it'd be most useful? You know, there was an economist who explained better than anyone exactly how this happens, how you get from good intentions to three companies own everything. His name was Ludwig van Mies. And relax, unclench. I'm not about to read you a textbook. There are no graphs coming. There's no pop quiz at the end. I'm not going to make you learn a single piece of economics vocabulary because you don't need it. You already understand his whole big idea. And you understand it from the most relatable place on earth, your own medicine cabinet. Here's how Mies saw the world. Government wants to fix a problem. And let's be generous. Let's say the intentions are good, pure even. There's a real problem people are hurting, and government wants to help. So it reaches in and pulls a lever, passes a rule, adds a subsidy, caps a price, hands out a license. And it does fix that first thing, genuinely, for a minute. But and here's Mies, it kicks off a side effect, something nobody in that room saw coming. The fix lands and three feet to the left something else quietly breaks. So what does deservant goo? So what does government do? It reaches back in and pulls Fix lands and three feet to the left, something else quietly breaks. So naturally, what does government do? It reaches back and pulls another lever to fix the side effect of the first lever. And the second effect. And the second fix, it causes a third problem. Now you need a third lever, which causes a fourth. And you've seen this exact movie. You've seen it a hundred times. It is every prescription drug commercial that has ever aired. Ask your doctor about this little pill for your headache. And then at the end, the announcer drops his voice and starts talking real fast. May cause drowsiness, nausea, dizziness, dry mouths, and suddenly inexpectable urge to refinance your home. So now you need a second pill for the side effects of the first pill. And then a third pill for what the second pill did. And six months later, you're standing in your bathroom holding a fistful of orange bottles, and you cannot remember for the life of you which one of these was for the original headache. That Is the government in the economy. One fix, one side effect. That is the government in the economy. One fix, one side effect, another fix, another side effect, and on and on forever, world without end. And look, if the medicine cabinet isn't doing it for you, you already know this one from your own house. You've lived it. You decide on a Saturday you're gonna fix one little leaky faucet. Simple. 45 minutes tops, then you're watching the game. Except you get under the sink and the shutoff valves corroded. So now you've got to replace the valve. And the new valve doesn't fix the old pipe. So now you've got. So now you're in the truck headed to Home Depot. And while the water's already off, ⁓ might as well swap that other fitting too, right? While we're in there. And while we're in there means cutting into the drywall. And now there's a hole in your wall. The water's been off for six hours. You've made three trips to Home Depot, and your wife's standing in the doorway going, I thought you said this was a faucet. One small fix, a whole weekend. That's the government in an economy. Except nobody ever turns the water back on and the contractor moves in and lives there now. And you ever notice that part? The fixing never ends. There's no version of the story where Washington reaches into an industry, solves the one thing, dusts off its hand, and goes, Great, all fixed. We'll be headed out now. Sorry for the mess. That's never happened, not once in the whole history of the republic. The b The fixing is the business. The fixing is the entire job, and every single round of it leaves the place a little more broken than before, and leaves you a little more dependent on the only outfit big enough to keep up with the mess they made. And now here's the part that matters most for tonight. This is the hinge the whole episode turns on, so stay with me. Every single time government reaches in and makes the rules of an industry more complicated, every new form. Every new compliance requirement, every new license and inspection and approval and filing. Who do you suppose handles all that best? The little guy? The scrappy startup? The family business with 12 employees and one tired lady doing the books at the kitchen table after the kids go down? No! Of course not! The giant! The giant handles it best every time. The corporation with a legal department and a compliance department and a lobbying department and a whole floor full of people whose entire job, their whole career is reading regulations you have never heard of and will never hear of. And a whole floor of people whose entire job, their whole career, is reading regulations you have never heard of and never and never. Reading regulations you have never heard of and will never hear of. To the giant, a mountain of new red tape is an annoyance, a line item. To the little guy, that same mountain is a wall. He just can't climb. Every new rule is a mountain. And the giant showed up with helicopters and climbing crews and oxygen tanks. The little guy showed up with a step stool and a good attitude. So every fix, every well-meaning layer quietly thins the herd. Nobody in that committee room planned it. Nobody wrote crush small business on the whiteboard. But it happens anyways. Every single time. The big get bigger, the small disappear, and we call the result the market. And here's the tell. Here's how you know this stopped being an accident a long time ago. How you know the Giants figured this out and started running the play on purpose. You wanna know who a regulation really helps? Don't listen to the speech. Don't read the press release with a nice sounding name. Just watch for who showed up to lobby for it. Because here's the thing that'll bend your brain the first time you really see it. An awful lot of corporations, it's the giant corporations themselves, are quietly begging for more regulation. The big guys lining up at the microphone to support the new rule, and every common sense instinct in your body goes, wait, hold on. Why on God's green earth would a company want to be regulated more? Because they already ran the math you didn't. They can eat the cost of that rule before breakfast. The compliance floor is already built. The lawyers are already on the payroll. What's one more form? But that hungry little competitor coming up behind them, the one with the better idea who might actually have beaten them in 10 years? For him, that same rule is a brick wall with his name spray painted on it. The giant isn't backing the regulation in spite of the burden. He's backing it because of the burden. The burden is the whole point, the burden is the moat. And he just got the taxpayer to dig for him and call it consumer protection. And you've watched this version of this with your own two eyes, right in your own town. Some guy wants to sell tamales out of a cart. Some woman wants to braid hair out of her kitchen or sell pies she baked in her own oven. And out of nowhere, there's a license and a permit and a $400 inspection. And of course, you've got to take and pay for to braid hair. And who quietly deeply loves every bit of that? The salon downtown that already paid for all of it years ago. The little guy didn't get out competed. He didn't lose in the market. He got zoned out of existence before he ever unlocked the front door. The market never even got to vote. That's how monopolies are created by the government. By government meddling. A true free market would never allow something like Alphabet to happen. And once you see that, once you really see it, you start to notice a pattern, the same pattern, over and over and over across industries that have nothing else in common. I'm gonna draw it for you right now, slowly, because once this loops in your head, I promise you, you can't unsee it. You'll see it in the news tonight, you'll see it in your next grocery run. Here's how it goes there's five steps. One, government steps into a market, good intentions, bad intentions, doesn't matter, it reaches in. Step two the market. Market bends. Prices, rules, incentives, barriers to entry, they all get distorted, pulled out of shape. Step three: the big players adapt to the new shape because they can afford to. The small players can't keep up and they fall away. The market gets more concentrated, fewer companies, bigger companies, the herd thins. Step four. Now those big surviving companies are rich and powerful, and they're sitting on piles of money. So they go and they buy themselves some political muscle. Lobbyists, donations, a revolving door, friends in the building, phone numbers that get answered. Step five, and this is the killer. They take the political muscle and they use it to get more rules written. New rules. And what a coincidence. What an absolute coincidence. The new rules just happen to lock in their position and make it even harder for the next competitor to even get started. Try starting a new car company in America. ⁓ and then. You're right back at step one. The wheel turns again and again and again. Government steps in, market distorts, concentration, political influence, more government steps in. Round and round it goes. That's how governments create monopoly. It's whack-a-mole. Except somewhere along the way, the mole bought the arcade, the mole owns the mallet now, the mole writes the rules of the game, sets the price of the tokens, and you're just standing there with a fistful of quarters wondering why you can never win. And I want you to notice the direction this spins because a free market, a real one, is supposed to spin in your favor. Every turn of the wheel is supposed to make something. And I want you to notice the direction this thing spins. Because a free market, a real one, is supposed to spin in your favor. Every turn of the wheel is supposed to make somebody fight a little harder for your dollar. Better product, lower price, nicer service. That's the wheel working for you. ⁓ but this loop, this loop spins the other way. Every turn makes the giant a little safer, the door a little more locked, your choice a little fewer, your bill a little higher. Same wheel, spinning backwards, working for them against you a little more every year. And here's the part nobody likes to say out loud, so I'll say it. You help pay for it. The lobbyists, the donation, the friends in the building, the rules written on the rules written to lock you out. A lot of that runs on money these companies only have because they're giant, and they only got giant because the government bent the market their way in the first place. So you funded the wall that's now keeping you out. You bought the bricks, your paying for the mansion. So you funded the wall that's now keeping you out. You bought the bricks, you're paying the mason, and then you're standing outside the door you paid to build, wondering why it won't open. And once that loop is running in your head, once you've got the eyes, watch how many industries suddenly snap into focus, just like that. Now I'm not gonna deep dive these tonight, not yet. The deep dives are coming in next. Now I'm gonna go through these a little. Now I'm not gonna deep dive these right now, not yet. It's coming. But I want you to start to see the pattern. Just look at it. Every single thing. Healthcare. Government sets the payment rules, the licensing, the approvals, who's allowed to build, what and where. And surprise, the giant hospital systems that can afford armies of administrators to navigate all of it, slowly swallow up the ones that can't. The independent doctor, the little community hospital, gone, absorbed. Concentration. And then the giants that are left lobby hard to keep all those rules exactly where they are because those rules are the wall protecting them. That's the loop. Agriculture. Decades of subsidies and programs and rules quietly tilted to reward scale. The whole system whispering the same two words every farmer in America, get big or get out. And the small family farm, the one in the postcard, the one that we put on the butter, it can't play that game. It can't. The giants can, concentration, telecom, same thing. Try to start a new internet company in your own town tomorrow. Go ahead. I'll wait. You will run face first into a wall of local franchise agreements and permits and right-of-way rules built brick by brick for the company that is already there. The incumbent basically gets a moat dug around his castle, and the government's bought the shovels. That's the loop. Banking. We literally invented a phrase for this one and then said it out loud with a straight face. Too big to fail. We looked at the biggest banks in the country and we told them officially. That if they ever fell, the taxpayer you would be there to catch them. And you know what that does? Think about it. That makes the giant bank safer to lend to than the honest little community bank on the corner that has no such promise. We didn't just allow the big banks to get bigger, we handed them a government safety net that the little guy could never ever get. That's the loop. And I can hear it now. You're four examples deep, and you're starting to see this thing in your sleep. Good, that's the point. And when it tattooed. Inside of your eyelids by the time we're done. Two more, energy. Ever wonder why you can't shop around for who delivers electricity to your house? Why you just get whoever you get and you take the bill they hand you? Because somewhere along the line, the government carved up the territory and handed one con and handed one company the keys to your entire region. That's not a free market. That happened to produce a single provider. That's a monopoly with a government permission slip stapled to the front. That's the loop. And then there's defense. ⁓ defense. Defense is the cleanest one of all, and we're gonna come back to it with the full receipts. But here's the teaser. Back in the 90s, I talked about this earlier, the government didn't even bother with the loop being subtle. It just skipped to the end. It sat the defense contractors down at a literal dinner and told them, told them to merge, to consolidate. Hold that thought. We'll come back to it later, and the body count. Six industries, totally different products, different history, same exact loop every time, all now being led. Dominated and price controlled by monopolies that the government created. Okay? And refuses to break them up. We see a market with three giant companies left standing in it, and we go, wow, capitalism sure produced some big winners. We point at the monopoly like it's the problem that just walked in the door this morning, like it appeared out of nowhere, like it's the start of the story. The monopoly isn't where the story starts. The monopoly is where the story ends. It's the very last page. It's the thing you can finally see standing right out in the open after decades and decades of stuff you couldn't see at all. You know, Google, food, healthcare, these companies became this way because of government. The monopoly isn't the disease. The monopoly is the scar tissue. Think about that. Think about what scar tissue actually is. It's what grows back thick and hard and permanent over a wound. And here's the thing about a scar: by the time you can see it, the cutting is long over. The injury happened years ago, decades ago. You're not looking at the wound, you're looking at the aftermath. You're staring at the scar and calling it the cause. That's what a monopoly is. It's the hard, permanent tissue that grew back over a market that government kept cutting into one layer, one rule, one well-meaning fix at a time for 50 years. The giant you're yelling at today is the scar. The blade was the intervention going in over and over long before most of us were even paying attention. And that is the thing I really desperately need to land with you tonight. Because for years, for decades, we've been doing this totally backwards. You have been blaming the symptom. You yell at the giant corporation. And look, most of the time they have absolutely earned it. And we're just going to yell at a few of them, believe me. But the giant corporation is the scar. It's the result. The blade, the actual cause, the thing that did the cutting was government intervention reaching into that market lever after lever after lever, year after year. And the only thing that could survive was a giant. We've regulated ourselves into monopolies. You've been cursing the scar and ignoring the knife. Which brings us finally to the quiet little lie we've all been telling ourselves, and it happens to be the name of the whole show tonight. We keep calling this a free market. We say it with a hand over our heart, like the pledge. This is the free market, greatest system on earth. Don't you dare touch it. Hands off. So let me just ask it straight out, no flinching. Is it? Have we regulated ourselves completely out of the free market? Because if the road to becoming one of the biggest companies in America increasingly runs through Government contracts and subsidies and reimbursement systems, and getting your merger blessed and approved by a federal regulator, and carve outs and regulatory advantages your competitor can't get, and an army of lobbyists on retainer and just the right relationships with the right people in Washington? Then how free exactly is that market, really? Be honest. Because that does not sound like Rockefeller clawing his way up to the 90% by out-hustling and outbuilding every single competitor, the old brutal, honest way, until the market got so closed off that the referee finally had to step onto the field. Remember our referee from the start? Standard Oil was a monopoly built in the market, earned even, and then broken up to reopen the game. But this, what we've been describing tonight, this is an entirely different animal. This is a monopoly built with. The help of the government in the first place, and then protected by the same government after. That's not the referee stepping into the field to keep things fair, no. That's the referee up in the owner's box, feet up, holding a beer, cashing a check from the team that's already winning. And every so often leaning over the railing to throw a flag on anyone who gets too close to the home team. That is not protecting competition, that is protecting competitors. It's the exact thing, the exact thing that your gut hates the most. The thing we spent all earlier learning to name. Except somewhere along the way, somebody convinced us all to call it by a different name. They convinced us to call this capitalism. It is the exact opposite. So if that's true, if this loop, this cycle genuinely built the concentrated, overpriced, take it or leave it, America, that you and I are actually standing in right now, tonight, then the very next question writes itself, doesn't it? It's obvious. Screaming where? Where are the biggest examples? Which giants and which specific name giants are sitting on your wallet right now, this very minute, as you're listening to me? Because once you've got these eyes on. Once you really truly see the loop and the scar and the referee and the owner's box, you're gonna start seeing them absolutely everywhere. In your pocket, in your medicine cabinet, in your refrigerator, in your living room. We have created a free market of monopolies with zero choice, higher prices, and worse service and quality. So here's the problem with everything I just told you. You're now nodding along about monopolies. You're fired up, but in your head, you're still picturing the wrong thing. You're picturing standard oil, the old political cartoon, the octopus, Rockefeller and the Top Hat, Tentacles wrapped around the Capitol, one company, one product, easy to spot, a mile away. And that's exactly why you'll never see the next one coming, because the monopoly that's actually sitting on you right now does not look like that, and it's never going to look like that again. Let me walk you through your own morning. Your alarm goes off on a phone running Android, which is Google. You roll over, check your email, Gmail, Google. You want to know if it's gonna rain. You don't search the web, you Google it. It's a verb now. We literally turn the company's name into the verb for the entire activity, which, when you think about it, is the most successful branding in human history. You get in the car, you open maps, Google. You get to work, your kids home, watching YouTube, Google. They downloaded a game off the Play Store. Google takes a cut of that too. Your photos are backed up in the cloud. I'll give you a three guesses. You never sat down and bought yourself a Google Monopoly. Nobody sold you one. You built it yourself, one free, convenient little piece at a time. And here are the numbers, just so you know I'm not exaggerating for radio. Around 90% of all internet searches in this country go through Google. On phones, it's closer to 95%. Roughly 39 cents of every single dollar spent on digital advertising in the United States, every banner. Every sponsored result flows to that one company. And in case you think I'm the crank in the tinfoil hat here, two separate federal co two separate federal courts have now looked at Google and used the actual word out loud, monopolist. A federal judge wrote it down in a ruling. And that big search case was brought by Donald Trump's Justice Department. So save the email. This is not a left-wing thing. And now here's the part that really gets me, because half the engine I just walked you through, Google didn't even build it. They bought it with a shopping cart and a checkbook right out in the open while the government waved them through the checkout line every single time. The phone in your pocket, Android, they bought that back in 2005 for around 50 million bucks, which in hindsight might be the greatest bargain in the history of money. YouTube, the thing your kids stare at for six hours a day, they didn't invent it. They bought it in 2006, a billion and a half dollars for a company that wasn't even two years old. The ad business, the 39 cents of every dollar, a huge chunk of that came buying a company called DoubleClick. The thing that lets them follow you around the entire internet, that was a purchase too. And every single time, every one, they had to walk up to a federal regulator and ask permission. Hey, can the biggest search company on earth also buy the biggest video site on earth? And the government looked at, stamped it, and said, sure, go ahead, have fun. Free market. And you want to know how the octopus got eight arms? We handed it to them, one approval at a time with a smile. And here's the freshest part, the punchline that just landed. At the very end of last year, after years and years of court fighting, the judge finally handed down the penalty for being an illegal monopoly. You ready? They told Google to share a little data and to ease up on a couple of its exclusive deals. That's the whole hammer. No breakup, they keep the search, keep Chrome, keep Android, YouTube, all of it. You return a library book three days late, you get a fine. You're the most dominant monopoly of the modern age. You get a stern look and a note that says do better. It's not a referee throwing a flag and ejecting a player. That's a referee gently asking the cheating team if they'd maybe consider cheating a little quieter. And that's the genius of the modern version. The old monopoly was one giant thing you could point at. This one is 40 small, convenient things you'd never think to connect. Your phone, your email, your map, your videos, your photos, the ads, the app store. Because no single piece feels like a monopoly, the whole thing stacks high in plain sight. It doesn't live in a building with signs out front. It lives in your pocket scattered across a dozen apps you actually like. It's not the loophole trick, it is the trick. Modern monopolies don't arrive wearing a top hat and carrying a sign that says Monopoly. They show up with free email and a really good map. That's the whole trick. Watch how it works, because it's the same four steps every time. First, it's a convenience. It's just genuinely the best search. Why wouldn't you? Then it's infrastructure. Now your email's there, your phone's there, your whole small business runs on it. Then it's a necessity. Go ahead. Try to run a week on your actual life without a single Google product. I'll wait. And then finally, it's inevitability. And then finally, it's inevitability. You can't even picture the alternative because there kind of isn't one anymore. Convenience, infrastructure, necessity, inevitability. Nobody ever conquered you. You got courted. So would Teddy Roosevelt, our trustbuster, the guy on the mountain, would he even recognize this as monopoly power? At first glance, no. He's standing there looking at an oil octopus and all he sees is a search box and a phone, doesn't compute. But look a little closer. Teddy didn't bust Standard Oil just for controlling the oil. He busted it for controlling the oil and the railroads that carried it. The product and the road to market, both. Both. Now look at Google. It owns the thing you're looking for, and the search box you find it through, and the ad you see on the way, and the phone in your hand, and the video you watch after. The product and the road. I think old Teddy figured this one out just fine. After that, I think old Teddy'd figure this one out just fine. Might take him a second to get past the lack of a top hat. Might take him a second to get past the lack of a top hat, but eventually he'd figure it out. A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly. The next one is one you can't walk away from because sooner or later every single one of us gets sick. Let's talk about healthcare. Think about how much actual choice you have in your own healthcare. Be honest. You don't really pick your hospital, your insurance picks it for you. You don't really pick your doctor, you pick a name off of an approved list. And here's the quiet thing that's happened while you weren't looking. The doctor you've trusted for 15 years, she's very probably doesn't work for herself anymore. Nearly half the doctors in America now work for a hospital system. A decade ago it was under a third. The independent doctor is going extinct, right alongside the independent everything else. Here's the lay of the land. About ninety percent of hospital markets in this country are now in what researchers politely call highly concentrated. In most cities, one or two giant systems run basically the whole show. There were over four hundred hospital mergers in just five years. And every time hospitals merge, the price of getting sick goes up. The studies land anywhere from 3% to 65%. One estimate pins this consolidation to roughly a trillion dollars in lost wages for American workers over a decade. Because it doesn't show up as a doctor's bill. It shows up as a bigger premium scraped out of your paycheck before you even feel a thing. But you don't need a study. You've held the proof in your own hands. It's that envelope that shows up four months after the appointment, the one that says in bold: this is not a bill. Which is the single most terrifying sentence in the English language because you know in your bones the actual bill is right behind it, loading up like a second wave. And you open it, and it's a document written in a language no human being on earth can read. There's a code, there's a facility fee, which is a fee they charge you for the privilege of the building existing. There's an adjustment, and then there's an adjustment to the adjustment. There's a $40 aspirin on there and some. Wear a $200 line item that just says supplies, and you're sitting at your titchen cable going, What supplies? I was there for 20 minutes. Did someone buy me a kayak? And you don't even know what you're gonna pay until weeks after that's over. Think about how insane that is. It's the only thing you buy in your entire life where you walk in and have no idea what it costs. Nobody will tell you when you ask. The price changes depending on the card in your wallet, and the bill arrives a season later like a surprise party, nobody wanted. You find out the exact price of a used Camry in Tucson at two in the morning from your couch, you can't ask a hospital the same question. They look at you like you asked them to solve a riddle. Nobody can know. That's not an accident. That's on purpose. And here's the part that stops being funny. There are families in this country, good working insured families, sitting in a car in a parking lot at eleven at night doing math, real math. Is this bad enough or good enough for the ER, or do we wait until the morning and hope? People are pricing out their kids' fever. People will get the ambulance bill and they don't pay it because they can't. So it sits in a drawer, turning into a thing that wrecks their credit for the crime of having an emergency. That's what concentration feels like when it's the one thing you can't walk away from. You don't get to take your business elsewhere. There is no elsewhere. There's just one system in town and the envelope that's not a bill and the drawer. So take a breath, shake that off, because here's the question that's gonna make you mad in more than one way. And why did it all clump up like this? The same reason as everything else tonight. The government built the wall. A lot of states have these things called certificate of need laws, which means a new hospital has to go to the government to ask permission to even open. And the hospitals that are already there get a say in whether the new one's even allowed. Imagine if Wendy's got a formal vote on whether you're allowed to open a second burger stand across the street. That's not a market. That's a medieval guild with an EHR system. Now someone's already yelling, Chad, it's the insurance companies. And I gotta be honest with you. Cause I always am. Be careful there. The big insurer is actually the one player with the muscle to push the hospital's price back down. The thing quietly inflating your bill is the hospital system that's eaten every competitor in town, not the insurance company. Aim at the right target. The easy villain isn't always the right one. And look. This isn't a healthcare story. You see it, right? It's the same story. New costume. Government rules. Nobody can navigate but the giants. The little guys vanish. Concentration. The survivors lobby to freeze these rules in place. Your bill goes up. Same loop. Different building. Now the one that touches every single person listening three times a day, no exceptions, no opting out. You don't get to abstain from eating. And you already felt this one tonight, top of the show. Same grocery cart, 40 bucks more, fewer bags. Let's talk about why that's happening because it's not an accident and it's not just inflation. The beef in your freezer, it ran through one of four companies. Four companies process about 85% of beef in the United States of America. 85%. Wanna know what that number was back in 1980? Around 36. So inside one lifetime, maybe your dad's lifetime, we went from something that looked like an actual market down to four. And for all the rugged red, white, and blue branding on the packaging, two of those four companies are foreign-owned. Brazilian, your all-American cookout has a passport. Here's the part that makes ranchers absolutely lose their minds, and it's the cleanest little picture of how concentration robs you. When this happens, the rancher gets paid less and you pay more at the same time, both directions at once. How is that even possible? Because when there are only four buyers, the guy raising the cattle has almost nobody to sell to, take their price or go bust. And when there are only a few giants on the shelf, the family at the checkout has almost nobody else to buy from. So the gap in the middle, the spread, just gets fatter and fatter, and it does not go to the rancher, and it sure does not come back to you. It sits in the middle with four. And I want you to actually picture that rancher for a second because he's not a statistic. He's a real guy, fourth generation, maybe fifth, on the same patch of ground, up before the sun, out in the weather that would put you and me back in bed, doing the hardest, honest work left in this country. And when it finally comes time to sell his cattle, he doesn't haggle, he doesn't shop it around, he doesn't get to play. He doesn't get to play four buyers off each other to get the best deal. Because for this whole region, there's basically one buyer who matters, and that buyer slides a number across the table, and that number is the number. Take it, or watch your herd eat you into bankruptcy while you wait for a better offer that is never, ever coming. That's not a negotiation. That's a ransom note in a cowboy hat. And a little more every year, another one of those families finally gives up. Sells off the land their great grandfather cleared by hand and drives away from the only life they ever knew, and the land gets bought by something bigger. And here's the gut punch. At that very same moment, that rancher's getting squeezed down, you're standing at the meat counter watching the price go the other way, up. And you're doing that quiet little thing everyone does now that nobody talks about. You pick up the package, you look at the price, you look at the size, and you just set it back down. Quietly and grab the smaller one or the store brand or nothing. They've even got a word for that trick now. Shrinkflation. We know this. Same money, less food. They shrank the package and bet you wouldn't catch it. You caught it. You always catch it. So follow the money one more time. The rancher's getting robbed on one end. You're getting robbed on the other end. And somewhere in the middle, there are four companies doing just fine. Thanks for asking. And it's not just the cow, it's the seed. A tiny handful of companies control most of the seed and the chemicals that grow nearly everything you eat. The American farmer barely even owns its own planting anymore. And it's not just the giants getting bigger, it's the little guy getting locked out of the room entirely. Go talk to a small farmer sometimes, the real article, the one with dirt that doesn't wash off. He'll tell you he can't even get in. He can't sell to the big processors because he can't promise them a hundred thousand identical chickens by Tuesday morning. He can't hit the volume. He can't sign the contract. He can't afford the floor of lawyers and compliance it takes to get a meeting. So the market that's supposed to be the freest thing in America, the market for food, quietly grew a velvet rope, and the honest little farmer is standing on the wrong side of it, not on the list. His only way left to reach you is a folding table at a farmer's market on a Saturday morning, charging more than the grocery store. And everybody assumes he's the expensive boutique option, the hobby guy. He's not charging more because he's greedy. He's charging more because he's the only link in the entire chain who never got a government thumb on the scale. We took the most honest food in America and made it the luxury item. We flipped the whole thing upside down and called it normal. How'd we get there? Decades of farm policy quietly humming the same two words, every grower in the country. Get big or get out. Subsidies and rules tilted year after year to rewards scale and scale only. And the little family farm, the one we literally put on the butterbox to sell you the dream. It can't play the game. It was never built to. So I'll ask you straight. Did we build a food system optimized for the people doing the eating or for the people doing the scaling? You already know you did the math in the parking lot. And the government has finally noticed the mess it made. There's now federal investigations into meat packers, which is by the little And the government has finally noticed the mess it made, by the way. There's now a federal investigation into meatpackers, which is a little like the arsonist swinging by to help look into the fire. Which is a little bit like the And now the government has finally noticed the mess it made. There's now a federal investigation into the meat packers, which is a little like the arsonist swinging by to help look into the fire. I'll do this one quick because this one has engineered you to glaze over all questions. Three letters. PBM, pharmacy benefits manager. It's the middleman sitting between you and your own medicine. And three of them, owned by big insurance companies, control around 80% of the prescription in this country. Now here's the magic trick, and it's a very good one. Very often, your insurance company and the middleman who decides what your drug costs and the pharmacy that hands it to you. Are the same corporation wearing three different name tags. You think you're walking through a marketplace, you're walking through a hall of mirrors, and every reflection is sending you an invoice. So ask yourself, are these companies competing to get your medicine cheaper? Or are they just extraordinarily good at navigating a government system so complicated that only a giant can survive inside? Patent games to keep the cheaper version of the shelf an extra few years. A regulatory maze a startup couldn't afford to walk through. It's not a market, it's an obstacle course, and the only the giants get handed the map. And the casualty is the corner pharmacist, the one who actually knows your name and your kids, by the way. These middlemen pay him back less than his own cost until he finally locks the door for good. Meanwhile, about a third of Americans are straight up skipping or rationing medication because of price. Same loop, you just feel this one standing on the counter with your card out holding your breath. Then there's the sky. Four airlines right now run about 80% of it. But I want to handle this one with some care because it's actually the most honest and most interesting story of the whole night, and it does not cut cleanly in one direction. I'd be lying if I pretended it did. Remember the cheap airline that just vanished at the top of the show, Spirit? Here's what actually happened: Spirit was gonna merge with Jet Blue. And the government stepped in and blocked that merger specifically to protect competition. keep the cheap option alive for you. And then Spirit went under anyways. Broken business model, fuel prices, the works. So now there are even fewer cheap seats than before. And here's the detail that tells you everything about the world we're living in. At the very end, the scrappy little discount airline, the one whose whole brand was we're the alternative to the big guys. What was its last move? It went to Washington with its handout looking for a half a billion dollar government bailout to stay alive. Even the rebel in the end ended up at the same door as everybody else, asking the government to save it. The bailout didn't come, the lights went out, and 17,000 people lost their jobs overnight. That's where the road ends when bargaining with Washington becomes the whole game. Even the underdog stops competing and starts begging. So one side looks like so one side looks at that and says, There it is, the regulators marched in to protect competition and made the whole thing worse. Spirit's dead, your cheap fare died with it. Nice work. And honestly, there's real meat on that bone. But the other side says, hang on, Spirit's own board first called that merger anti-competitive. And JetBlue was reportedly planning to hike fares on those exact routes, anyways. So which is it? And that, right there, is the whole ball game. That is protecting competition versus protecting competitors live out in the wild where it's genuinely hard. A good referee keeps that field open for the next scrappy cheap airline nobody's ever heard of. A bad referee just stands there picking which big carrier gets to the gate and telling those two apart in the moment with real money on the line. That takes actual wisdom. Because it turns out that's the entire So think about it: six completely different worlds. One's software, one's surgery, one's cattle, one's a guy stringing wire down your street. Nothing in common. Except the fingerprints. The exact same fingerprints on every single one. Government reaches in, the giants are the only ones who can navigate it. The little guys die off. Concentration. The survivors take their winnings and go by political power, and they keep that political power in order to maintain their monopoly. Then they increase prices on you and I, remove competition, and reduce quality. These were never six stories. It's one story wearing six different costumes. And remember, the monopoly isn't the disease. The monopoly is the scar tissue. Well, now you've run your hand over the scars in your search bar on your own body, in your freezer, in your medicine cabinet, in your living room in the same sky. In your living room, in the sky, same wound, six times, same knife. So here's what should be gnawing at you right now as we So here's what should be gnawing at you right now. Every single thing I just showed you, the concentration, the rules, the loop, all of it. The conservatives I told you about at the top of the night, the trustbusters, Teddy's party, the people who built the hammer, they would have seen all this coming from a mile away. They built the exact tools to stop it. They already knew how this movie ends. So why aren't they swinging the hammer? Why did the one group in this entire country that actually understood all of this? that fought it and won and put the winner's face on the mountain, why did they go quiet and step back and let it happen to you? That is not an accident. Nobody just forgets something they were good at. Somebody talked them out of it. And now I'm gonna show you exactly who, exactly when, and exactly how the most conservative idea in American history got quietly rebranded as socialism. So here's my honest answer. It's not because they all got bought off. It's not a cartoon with a stack of money. It's sadder than that and a lot more human. They got confused by something they genuinely So why have conservatives let all this happen to you and go quiet? Here's the honest answer: it's not because they all got bought off. It's not a cartoon with a sack of money. It's sadder than that and a lot more human. They got confused by something that genuinely deserves to confuse them. Because somewhere in the last 50 years, antitrust got hijacked. The other side picked up the hammer the right had built, and they started swinging it at the wrong things. They started using it to engineer outcomes, to punish companies they didn't personally like, to chase fairness and equity and whatever the faculty lounge word of the month happened to be. They stopped refereeing the game and started trying to decide who won it. And conservatives looked at that correctly and said, No, that's not a referee, that's a thumb on the scale. That's central planning in a robe. We're out. And they were right to be suspicious of that. I need you to hear me clearly because this is the whole thing. That instinct was correct. problem is what they did next, because in their complete justified disgust at the bad version of the tool, they threw out the whole tool. They didn't just fire the bad referee and go hire a good one. They burned down the entire field. They decided that if antitrust could be abused, then antitrust itself must be the enemy. That right there, that's the great confusion. They lost the ability to tell apart the two things we spent the whole night separating. Protecting competition versus protecting competitors, keeping the field fair versus picking the winner. They watched the bad guys pick winners, and they concluded the fix was to pull the referee off the field completely and just let the biggest team win in the league, do whatever it wanted. But a bad referee was only ever an argument for a better referee. It was never ever an argument for none. We talked ourselves into no referee and we called it freedom. And the biggest team on the field has been quietly sending us a thank you card every year since in the form of a higher bill. This is why we're broke. This is why people are poor. We have no competition left. Every major industry in America is consolidated into three or four companies. That's not a free market. All of them. And it's not because these companies are greedy and it's corporate greed. No. The government put their thumb on the scale, pulled all these levers, monopolies were the result, and the companies learned how to build moats around themselves through legislation and political power. That's it. And everyone's just saying, ⁓ these companies need to be broken up. Period. We need competition. We need to restore true price based on competition, price based on risk, price based on job, price based on performance, not based on government intervention. The entire market has been made completely centrally planned now, based on all these little levers that the government has pulled. We are no longer living in a free market, ladies and gentlemen, not at all. And that's really the trick, the monopoly trick I call it. That confusion set up the greatest magic chick in modern American economics. I'm gonna say this part slow because if you walk away from tonight remembering exactly one sentence, this is it. Greatest trick the modern monopolies ever pulled was not convincing the Democrats they were necessary. It was convincing conservatives they were capitalism. Just sit in that for a second. Think about how good that trick is. The Giants figured out that they didn't actually need to win the argument on the left. They needed to capture the right. Because the right is the side that guards the gate. The right is the side that says, leave business alone, hands off. So if you can get the five biggest corporations on planet Earth to stand right behind the free market guys and whisper, we're the same thing, you and us, we're capitalism. Defend us. Then you have just turned the free market's own bodyguard into the monopoly's bodyguard. And it worked beautifully. We spent years out here defending the most powerful companies in the history of the world, companies built on government contracts and subsidies and approved mergers, and a standing army of lobbyists. And the whole time we thought we were defending the corner store. We thought we were defending the kid in the garage. We were defending the people who bought the garage, bulldozed it, and put up a parking lot. They didn't beat capitalism. They just got us to guard them with it. They used capitalism as a way to protect themselves. But true capitalism does not ever result in monopolies this big, with this much power, without government intervention. It doesn't happen. And here's the part that should get you fired up, the good kind of fired up, because of what it has done to how actually. And here's the part that should really get you fired up, the good kind of fired up. Because of what this has done to how action Because of what this has done to how you actually get ahead in this country. There used to be a formula, the American formula. You want to win? Build something, make it better, or make it cheaper than the other guy. Compete and win. Build, compete, win. That was the whole dream. The better mousetrap takes the prize, and it didn't matter who your daddy was. There's a new formula now, and it has quietly replaced the old. There's a new formula now, and it has quietly replaced the old one boardroom by boardroom. The new formula goes like this Don't build a better product, hire a better lobbyist. Don't compete for the customer, bargain with the government. Lock in the contract, land the subsidy, get the merger blessed, buy the competitive buy the competitor before he ever becomes a threat, and then the important part, pull the ladder up behind you. Lobby, contract, subsidize, merge, acquire, protect, win. That's builders versus government bargain. That's builders versus bargainers. And the bargainers are winning. And here's how you know I'm not just theorizing at you. Last year, corporations spent a record more than $5 billion lobbying the federal government. $5 billion, the biggest jump in lobbying spending since they started keeping count this way. A record. And here's the tell, the detail that gives the entire game away. The industries that spent most on lobbying. Are the most regulated ones. Healthcare, pharma, finance. The deeper government's hands are in an industry, the more that industry spends on bargaining with the government. That is not a coincidence. That is the loop with a receipt stapled to it. Because that's the real cost here, folks, with these monopolies. The fastest path to wealth in America increasingly isn't building a better thing. It's securing a better position with the government. And a country that rewards positioning over building eventually stops building. That's not the free market getting more efficient. That's the free market getting captured. Just ask any country like UK, France, they're not innovating anything. When's the last amazing thing to come out of France? Zero. Except for maybe some of their weapons systems, which are, you guessed it, government subsidies. So what do we actually do about it? Because I want to be careful here. I'm not gonna hand you a fourteen point policy plan with a glossary and a QR code. That's not this show. Fix isn't complicated. It's a return. It's just remembering something we already knew deep down and lost. Conservatives were right about central planning, all of it. Right that bureaucrats can't run an economy from a desk. Right that one intervention spirals into ten. Right, that good intentions plus government power equals a mess every time. Bone deep, carved in stone, right? The one thing we missed, the only thing was what central planning leaves behind after it's done. We were watching the government grow with both eyes, and we never noticed the other thing growing right next to it. The companies getting bigger. The intervention would come and go, and it left scar tissue. It left concentration, and we walked right up to that concentration and called it capitalism because it had a logo and a stock price, and it technically wasn't the government. But a private monopoly that the government built and the government protects is not the free market. It's just central planning in a better suit. And if any of this part still thinks it sounds strange, a conservative standing here telling you that breaking up anopoly can be a free market thing to do. And folks, if any part of you still thinks this sounds strange, a conservative like me standing here telling you that breaking up a monopoly can be the free market thing to do, then let me leave you with one last story about the most beloved conservative of them all. Ronald Reagan, my hero. Remember Ma Bell from earlier, the phone company that owned the phone bolted to your wall, charged you by the minute to call your own grandmother and made it against the rules to plug in your own phone? The biggest, most total corporate monopoly this country has ever seen up to that point. Here's the part I held back, the part I've been saving all night. Ma Bell got broken up in 1984. Guess who was sitting in the White House in 1984? Whose Justice Department drove that breakup all the way across the finish line? The single largest corporate breakup in the history of the world? Ronald Wilson Reagan. Patron saint of the modern right, the free market hero whose name's conservative salite, Grace before dinner. His administration took the biggest company in America and cracked it wide open and unleashed the competition that handed you the cell phone, the smartphone, the entire connected world that's sitting in your pocket right now. And Reagan did not believe for one second he was attacking capitalism. He thought he was rescuing it. He understood it the same way Teddy understood it, the same way the whole party once understood it in its bones. The enemy of the free market isn't only big government. It's any concentrated power that gets so large it strangles the competition underneath it, public or private. And that is the coalition we're actually in. Not left, not right. The people who still believe the door is supposed to stay open. The politically homeless folks who got told their whole lives they had to pick love business or love the little guy. And always knew somewhere in their gut that was a lie. That was a false choice. Somebody sold them. There's a tent for you. There always was. It's the one that still remembers what Ronald Reagan remembered. See, conservatives didn't create antitrust because they hated capitalism. They created it because they loved it, because they understood deeper than anyone that capitalism only works exactly as long as competition is alive. The day the competition dies, the free market dies right along with it, no matter how many giant logos are still standing in the rubble. So if competition is capitalism, then restoring competition might just be the most conservative thing Americans do. Most conservative thing America can do today. We spent this whole night looking at the building, and now you know it was never the weather. It was never the weather. Go look at your bills with new eyes this week and remember that door is supposed to be open. All right, folks, that was the show. I'm Chad Law, America's binary brother, the last gay conservative, the common sense extremist living in radical reality. Here to tell you. Living in radical reality, don't forget the phone number, ladies and gentlemen, 252 Chad Law. That's 252 Chad Law. Look us up on Rumble, X, Substack. We're everywhere. Common sense with Chad Law. In America, that truly was common sense. It's time to break them up. Stop the government from allowing monopolies to create in the aftermath of their central planning and break up the ones they've already created. Let's go. Give us ten seconds to reset the studio as I move over to the after hours for Rumble and answer all the questions that you guys have been sending in during this monologue Monday. All right, we're in the after hours. Welcome back. I'm gonna breeze through these questions. It's been a long night, so let's get through it. Some of these monologue Mondays get really heavy, intellectually heavy, and I wanna make sure I give you guys a little breathing room in between. But it was very, very that's a very, very important thing to understand, antitrust and why these monopolies are making us all poorer. All right. First one from Diane in Ohio, texted 4471. She says, Chad, you said a big insurance company can actually push hospital prices down. That broke my brain a little. Are you telling me insurance monopolies are the good guys now? No, Diane. Nobody's getting a hug tonight, especially not your insurance company. But I do love this question because it's a thing nobody on talk radio ever wants to admit, and it's the truth. So here we go. The world is not a cartoon where there's one villain and everyone else is innocent. In healthcare, you've got giants stacked on top of giants, and they're actually fighting each other a little. The big insurer is mean to the hospital, the hospital is mean to you. And when the insurer is big and tough, it can walk into the negotiation and say, absolutely not to the hospital's insane price. And that no is the only thing in the whole system that's ever once worked in your favor. The problem is it doesn't pass the savings on to you, it just keeps it. So you've got two predators wrestling over your wallet and you're rooting for the slightly smaller one. That's not a market, that's a nature documentary. The actual villain, the one I'd point you at, is the hospital system that's eaten every competitor in your town and then got the government to lock the door behind them. Hello, Kaiser. That's the big one. That's the one to watch. Kaiser has systematically created a monopoly, especially in rural America and and in poor communities. All right, text from Mark in Tennessee, ending in 0810. Chad, respectively, you just spent an hour arguing for breaking up corporations. That's the Elizabeth Warren platform. How are you any different from her? Well, at least you're saying it to my face. Here's the difference, and it's the whole bar game. Warren and I might be looking at the same dragon. We just want complete opposite things. After we deal with it. Senator Warren looks at a giant company and she wants to control it, steer it, decide what it Pays, who it hires, what it makes, what it markets. She doesn't want to open the cage. She wants to be the one holding the leash. She wants the government in the captain's chair picking the winners. I don't want a captain's chair. I just want the cage open and all the leashes gone. I don't want to run these companies. I don't want the government to run these companies. She's trying to protect certain competitors and certain outcomes she likes for her own personal stock portfolio. I'm trying to protect competition. She made so much money from the spirit failure, it's not even funny. Her voting record went right along the trail of the probably millions of dollars she made off spirit stock. That's the entire difference, Marcus. She doesn't trust the guy. She doesn't trust the market. I'm the guy trying to give it back to you. Can't fix centralized power, private or public, with more centralized power. All right, a bunch of you texted versions of this, so I'm gonna take it. This one's from Ray in Virginia. Ray's gotta be near the Pentagon and his number's ending in two zero zero three. He says You dangled that defense dinner story twice. A neighbor gave us the receipts. Don't leave us hanging, man. You're right, I'm a tease. Here it is, and honestly, I staved it for the people who stayed up. So early 1990s, Cold War just ended, and the Pentagon's looking at all these defense contractors and going, The budget's about to shrink. There's too many of you. So they did something that, if a private company did, would be a federal crime. The government literally hosted a dinner. People in the the industry call it the Last Supper. And the Pentagon's leadership sat the defense contractors down and told them to merge, consolidate. There's not enough room for all of you at the table. So pair off. And they did. You want the number? In the 1990s, this country had 51 major defense prime contractors. 51. Today, five. 51 to 5. The government didn't let that happen. It ordered it over dinner. And now something like 90% of our missiles. Come from three companies and roughly twenty thousand smaller suppliers got squeezed out of the business entirely. And here's the thing, really, how that translates. When you're dependent on centralized power, your options are limited. That doesn't make us safer. That makes us more dependent. It's in the Pentagon's own report, admitting it, basically going, yeah, in hindsight, ordering everyone to merge might have kneecapped our own competition. You think? And so now they have no leverage to control price either. We're dependent on five companies for our defense in this country with no leverage on price. Great question, Ray. All right, next question. Kayla in Arizona, ending in seven seven, seven, seven. That's a lucky number, Kayla. I wish I had that number. I always use seven nine seven nine. She said, if Teddy Roosevelt came back from the dead today, which company is he breaking up first? I love this. ⁓ Teddy materializes, full mustache, little gases, probably immediately. Tries to fight someone. That's just him. That's a Tuesday for Teddy. ⁓ I love this. Okay, picture it. Teddy materializes, full mustache, little glasses, probably immediately tries to fight someone. That's just him. That's Tuesday for Teddy. First, he's gonna be furious that his face is a tourist gift shop on a mountain. Then somebody hands him a smartphone to calm him down. Bad move, because now he's looking at this glass receptacle, going, What's this? It's my phone, my map, my mail, my newspaper, my photo album, and it watches me. And somehow, yeah. And mostly one company makes all of that. Teddy doesn't even finish his lunch. Google's gone by lunch. Or Alphabet. But honestly, my money's on him circling back for the airlines because the man loved outdoors, loved to travel, and the second he finds out it costs him eighty dollars to bring a carry-on bag and the cheap airline just straight up vanished into thin air, Teddy Roosevelt is charging an airlight counter like it's a San Juan Hill. They're not ready. All right, next one from Sam in Oregon. Hey neighbor. 1188. Sam says, Chad, you actually built a business before this. Did you ever run into these government barriers yourself? Or is this theory? ⁓ no, it's not even a little bit of theory. People forget. Before this, I was a licensed hairdresser. Licensed. And let me tell you about barriers to entry, because cutting hair is one of the most regulated things you can legally do to a human being in this country. In a lot of states, to be allowed to put scissors near anyone's head for money. You need over a thousand hours of training. A thousand. There are states where you can become an EMT, keep a stranger alive in the back of an ambulance in a fraction of the hours it takes to be legally allowed to cut a bob. Make that make sense. And here's what I figured out even back then, standing behind that chair. Every single one of those hours, every license fee, every board, it doesn't really protect the customer. It protects the people who are already in. It's a wall. The wall is always taller for the person trying to get started than for the giant who's already inside. Marketing agency, same thing. I mean, one of the reasons why we didn't do political, we did a couple political campaigns as a favor, but one of the reasons why we didn't was because of all the regulatory red tape, and that's I could do a whole episode on that. So, no, when I talk about the little guy who can't get through the door, I'm not reading that off a card. I've been the little guy at the door, which is why this is very personal. And my marketing agency got swallowed up by a big guy as well. I mean, I did choose to sell, but there was a letter of intent on the table. All right, next one. Hector in Texas ending in 9090, another lucky number. I hear you, Chad, but real talk. If we break up our biggest companies, don't we just hand the whole future to China? Don't we need giants to compete with their giants? Wow. This is the best argument against me, and I am glad you made it because it sounds airtight, but it's totally wrong. What actually makes a company strong? Is it size or is it pressure? Think about it. A company with no competition gets fat, slow, lazy. It stops innovating because it doesn't have to. It coasts. A monopoly is a couch, comfortable, and it makes you weak. You know what made America technology dominate the entire planet? It wasn't one protected giant. It was the breakup of Ma Bell. When the government cracked that monopoly open in the 80s, all that talent and injury that were trapped inside one sleepy phone company exploded outward and became Silicon Valley. The competition is the thing that made us strong enough to beat everyone. China's actual problem is the opposite of ours. They've got state-backed national champions that don't have to compete in answer to a government. And that's exactly why a lot of them are bloated, brittle, and breaking down. So if you want to beat China, Hector, the answer isn't let's become more like China, which we are. Protected national champions is their model. Ours is supposed to be hungry, a hundred hungry little competitors clawing at each other to get to the top. We've completely eliminated that scrappiness that made this country what it is. And if we continue in this regulatory state, we will no longer innovate. We will no longer be the inventors of the internet and the smartphone. Someone else with a freer market and more innovation will take that over. Okay, last one, Patricia in Michigan ending in 5050. Chad, this was a lot. Tell me. So tell me something I can actually do. What's the one thing that would make the biggest difference? I love these questions. I'm glad you asked. Never want you leaving the show feeling small. The biggest part isn't the law. It's not a vote, though you should vote. The biggest thing that already happened to you tonight, you can't unsee it now. You're gonna go to the grocery store this week, you're gonna look at it, you're gonna Open the cable bill and actually understand why you've got no other option. You're gonna catch yourself about to defend some thousand billion dollar company out of reflex, and you're gonna stop and go, wait, am I defending competition or am I defending a giant because it's got a flag and on its website? And right there, that question running in a few million heads at once is the thing the giants are actually afraid of. Not regulators, regulators they can hire away. They're afraid of you figuring out their trick, this trick. Because the whole con only works as long as you keep guarding them with your own free market beliefs. So here's your one thing. Stop confusing big with good. Stop confusing concentration with capitalism. And every time some politician left or right tells you a giant needs protecting, you ask the one question: okay, can the next guy still compete? Is the door still open? Keep asking that out loud at dinner to your reps. You ask that question enough times in enough rooms. You'd be amazed how fast that door's been stuck fifty years can swing back open. All right, that's it for the after hours. You stayed up with me, I appreciate it. You now know me more than That's it for the after hours, folks. You stayed up with me. I appreciate you more than you know. If you see us, share us. I'm Chad Law. Go get some sleep. Make sure the door stays open. God bless you, President Reagan, and as always, may God save America.