Watching cable news last week, I was disturbed by the latest trend in conservative media: calling for every Republican candidate for president not named Donald Trump to drop out of the nomination race because, as Newt Gingrich put it, “it’s over.” The GOP nomination fight is not over. In fact, it hasn’t even started – just ask 2016 GOP nominee Scott Walker, who led early and burned out before people voted. But because most of conservative media are nothing more than an echo chamber – people afraid to disagree with their audience – this is considered “analysis.” With no real competition, on top of low standards, it’s what can pass for it, too.
There is nothing that improves with fewer competitors. Nothing. A race with one competitor is just watching someone jog, and that’s what these platforms have become – unwatchable, unlistenable echo chambers of narcissism and cheerleading masquerading as analysis. Essentially, it’s watching a relay race with only one team in it.
Ask yourself this about competition: Are you better off with, say, media consolidation? Has the quality of shows on television improved, for example, as Comcast swallowed up other networks and streaming services? That may sound counter-intuitive since it means more outlets through which shows can find an audience, but there are also a lot more shows that are simply garbage because they need so many to fill the time. Competition used to necessitate shows at least be nominally good to get made. Now Comcast needs content across an ever-growing list of platforms, so quality suffers as shows that never would’ve seen the light of day get made because they need “more.
In the Soviet Union, competition didn’t exist because communists don’t understand its virtues. The Trabant, a genuinely worthless car, was pretty much all you had. It never caught on anywhere in the free world because it was so awful.
The 20th century was “The American Century” largely because we embraced competition in the private sector, while simultaneously moving against monopolies. “Trust-busters” broke up monopolies as new entrants regularly entered markets, or created new markets altogether. Henry Ford, who would have afforded to, didn’t buy up every competitor because A) he wouldn’t have been allowed to, and B) he didn’t need to because he was out-selling them thanks to the quality of his product and its price. In short, competition.
The same is true everywhere. Or at least it was.
The horrible Google, which, together with Facebook, controls a huge percentage of online advertising, faces antitrust actions by the government. While they scramble to proclaim their innocence, they control the fates of online news websites. Fall out of favor with one or both and your website will find it very difficult to survive. Remember the “Independent Journal Review,” known as IJ Review? They were a wildly popular and influential news site that even co-hosted a Republican debate in 2016 with ABC News. Then Facebook changed its algorithm and it essentially disappeared overnight. Googling IJ Review brings the website up third in the results. They killed it.
There are competitors to Google and Facebook, but there is no competition. They bought up any of it that posed a threat over the years.
Now the steel industry is looking to contract, as Cleveland Cliffs moves to swallow up US Steel. You may think, “Who cares?” Have you looked at the price of new cars lately? Imagine what will happen to that price when the auto industry has fewer competitors making the materials to construct those cars. Hell, you don’t even have to think about cars, think about our national defense. China has a larger Navy than we do. Are we going to compete with them using wooden ships? Guess what consolidation is going to mean pricewise when the new company would control 100 percent of iron ore reserves.
You see it everywhere. Large corporations, China and even Bill Gates buy up family farmland. How about them food prices? When was the last time you got out of a grocery store for less than $60? Try to buy eggs recently? How’d that work out?
Everything, everywhere benefits from competition. It inspires innovation and keeps prices down. Plowing the field for Donald Trump won’t help him or Republicans, and neither will him sitting out debates, demanding a coronation. Certain things are just true: Family farms need to be protected, Google and Facebook should be broken up, government should not allow monopolies in steel or any industry, and the conservative media and pundit class need to recognize that competition matters; that actually campaigning and winning makes a candidate stronger. It’s been so long since these Republicans actually won anything, maybe they all forgot?
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.