Inevitably, I also notes from people who assert that financier domination is just capitalism in America, and always has been. Some (usually on the right) like this model of development, others (usually on the left) find it dystopian, but they are unified in a pervasive view that such market structures are both inevitable and long-standing. I find such an attitude bizarre, not for any philosophical reason, but because concentrating wealth and power in monopolized markets was just not accepted as a legitimate way to do business for most of American history.

From the 1600s to the 1970s, asking the question of how to constrain wealth and regulate prices was a core part of our tradition and ideology. Here is, for example, something from a 1779 pamphlet passed out in Philadelphia against profiteering during the Revolutionary War: “You that have money, and you that have none, down with your prices, or down with yourselves.… We have turned out against the enemy and we will not be eaten up by monopolizers and forestallers [aka speculators].”

That legacy, hundreds of years old, is why Americans are mad when we are mistreated or overcharged. We aren’t cynics and never have been, and we don’t believe that our corporations and governing institutions should be corrupt. We know at one point they weren’t. And that populist sentiment is bubbling up, in every nook and cranny of our society, because we know something about how we do business today is very wrong.

In the 1980s, most of our elites on the right and left were persuaded that monopolies were natural and, good or bad, simply the American Way. They changed policy accordingly, which is why most of the monopolies we know about were formed during or after that decade. But corruption and monopolization isn’t natural, or inevitable. It’s a choice we’ve made, and a choice we can always undo. Remember that.

With that in mind, here are a few more sectors that have been monopolized. At the end, I’ll offer ideas for what we can do about this problem (which isn’t actually that difficult to address.)