"America’s Serrata"

"The impulse of the powerful to make themselves even more so should come as no surprise. Competition and a level playing field are good for us collectively, but they are a hardship for individual businesses. Warren E. Buffett knows this. 'A truly great business must have an enduring "moat" that protects excellent returns on invested capital,' he explained in his 2007 annual letter to investors. 'Though capitalism’s "creative destruction" is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty.' Microsoft attempted to dig its own moat by simply shutting out its competitors, until it was stopped by the courts. Even Apple, a huge beneficiary of the open-platform economy, couldn’t resist trying to impose its own inferior map app on buyers of the iPhone 5.

"Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, 'Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.'"

Chrystia Freeland in The New York Times compares the present-day United States to fourteenth-century Venice.