antitrust laws....

the antitrust laws in this country are NOT enforced....  there are several good laws on the books....  but as of lately....  not a single president has enforced them....  someone needs to enforce them....  eye will enforce them....  there is one in partcular....  the robinson patman act....  that eye will most certainly enforce....

currently....  large corporations mimic each other....  so....  even if there is not a monopoly in an industry....  it feels like there is a monopoly....  if one company implements a policy that hurts the consumer....  and it makes them more money....  then the other corporations are bound to follow....  there are many oligopolies....  that act like monopolies....

lets look at an example....  the credit card industry....  back in the day....  when eye got my first credit card....  eye missed a payment....  and the penalty....  the late fee....  was thirty-five dollars....  a one time payment of thirty-five dollars....  then....  slowly....  over time....  the penalty grew....  eventually....  some credit card company....  came up with the brilliant idea....  to raise your interest rate if you missed a payment....  permanantly raise your interest rate....  pretty soon....  it seemed like ALL credit card companies would raise your interest rate if you missed a payment....  from some low interest rate....  if it was an introductory interest rate....  it might have been around five percent....  and then when you missed a payment....  the bank rose your interest rate to something crazy....  like twenty percent....  so....  if you had a balance of ten thousand dollars on your credit card....  your penalty....  was an annual charge of fifteen hundred dollars....  and if you could not pay off the credit card....  the penalty could last for years....  so lets compare....  thirty-five dollars vs fifteen hundred dollars....  or even more....  if you could not pay off the balance....  does that seem fair....  a fifteen hundred dollar fine for missing a payment by one day....  it sure does not seem fair....  but....  every credit card company did it....  they mimiced each others bad behavior....  

we could also talk about....  how one company in an industry.....  moved its customer service call center overseas....  or automated their customer service line....  and most of the other companies are following suit....  because....  if one company does it....  and it SAVES them money....  or....  makes them more money....  the rest of the companies will have to follow suit....  in order to survive....  if they do not copy the bad actor....  they will not survive....  

so we have two examples of companies mimicing each other....  in one situation....  to increase revenue....  in another situation....  to decrease costs....  

we need to create an anti-trust law that encourages companies to differentiate.....  to stop mimicing each other....  a law that penalizes companies when they act the same....  when they copy each other....

we also need an antitrust law that allows companies to cooperate in certain areas....  when it is beneficial to both the company and the consumer....  eye have two examples here....  we need a law....  that allows health insurance companies to collaborate....  to pay the same price for a medicine....  or a surgery....  or a doctors visit....  instead of having each insurance company negotiate a price with each pharmaceutical company or doctor....

in the second example....  we need to allow supplement companies to collaborate....  to get together and provide funding for research on supplements....