{"id":176748,"date":"2020-03-30T19:21:00","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T00:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/03\/30\/monopoly-power\/"},"modified":"2020-03-30T19:21:00","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T00:21:00","slug":"monopoly-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/03\/30\/monopoly-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Monopoly Power"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Corey Docterow has a twitter thread about how anemic monopoly enforcement may result in many thousands of deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n<blockquote data-lang=\"en\">\n<div dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">40 years ago, a fabulist named Robert Bork dreamed up an imaginary history of US antitrust law in order to justify dismantling it. <\/p>\n<p>1\/<\/p><\/div>\n<p>\u2014 Bernie Beats Trump (@doctorow) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/doctorow\/status\/1244397358986608640?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 29, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>You can follow the whole thing, but the short version is that the US government funded a small company to make an inexpensive and portable ventilators, and as they were getting near to a product, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2020\/03\/29\/business\/coronavirus-us-ventilator-shortage.html\">Covidien (now Medtronic) purchased the company and shut down the program because they did not want it to compete with its more expensive ventilators<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Robert Bork&#8217;s theory was that, &#8220;monopolies are only a problem when they raise prices in the short\/medium term.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We are now literally choking on Robert Bork&#8217;s dishonesty.<\/p>\n<p>May Robert Bork&#8217;s perfidious work be effaced. <\/p>\n<p>Docterow&#8217;s full twitter thread below:<\/p>\n<p><a name='more'><\/a><br \/><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"500\" src=\"https:\/\/threadreaderapp.com\/embed\/1244397358986608640.html\" style=\"max-width: 100%;\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"100%\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Corey Docterow has a twitter thread about how anemic monopoly enforcement may result in many thousands of deaths during the Covid-19 pandemic. 40 years ago, a fabulist named Robert Bork dreamed up an imaginary history of US antitrust law in order to justify dismantling it. 1\/ \u2014 Bernie Beats Trump (@doctorow) March 29, 2020 You &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[364,387,479,572,403],"class_list":["post-176748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-evil","tag-hypocrisy","tag-monopoly","tag-pandemic","tag-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}