Thank you for your question.
I disagree with your promises about how the US economy operates. To take Walmart as an example, I frequently use it in class to find out how students’ perceptions of companies and how profitable they are differ from the reality.
So I will ask you to do as I asked my students to do, and guess what Walmart’s profit rate, i.e. profits as a percentage of expenses, is. The answer is consistently less than 10%, often less than 5%. Walmart’s business model is to always be the other guys price. They get a lot of business that way, and that’s why they have built so many stores all over the world the last few decades. But there are many companies that are quite probably better long-term investments than that.
As for Amazon, there are many people (you may be among them) who view it as some kind of monopolistic predator. In fact, Amazon has made uncountable numbers of consumers much better off by giving them both more choice and better prices. I mostly use it to buy books, but the very existence of the e-book is a major convenience for someone like me who likes to read. And the company benefits consumers who are different from me in very many other ways they are largely invisible to me. The people of the United States and indeed around the world a much better off because Amazon exists, and to me this is the main thing. Jeff Bezos has many views I do not share, but customers have rewarded him and the other businesses he has bought with his billions because these companies are doing things valuable for these consumers, in part (so far) by continuously innovating. Good for him, he deserves every penny.
If you are concerned about frew expression, there is a far wider variety of opinions available to the general public than there was when I was a child. (Alas, many of these opinions are dumb, and some of them are even dangerous, but only competition among ideas can deal with this.)
In the United States most companies face intense competition to reward their owners by serving their customers. Almost every leader of every company wakes up every morning worrying intensely about what the competition is doing.
Of course there are exceptions. For example, drug manufacturers and health insurers consistently have high profit rates. I believe these are industries where competition is limited, substantially because of government intervention into the competitive process. (Health care is one of the most regulated industries in the United States.)
Free competition is not ideal, but as Churchill said in another context, it is the worst social system ever, except for all the others that have been tried from time to time. When I can contrast this process of competition what I believe to be the many blunders government has made when it has attempted to rearrange the terms of this competition, I think government officials could benefit from a lot more humility. Once it has gone beyond the basics of protecting property rights and providing public security, government policing of the conduct of free men will usually do much more harm than good. “But what about...?” is seldom a compelling objection, if we think the process through to the end.
IMHO, anyway.
Thanks. Agree with much of what you say. I would like to respond more clearly, but am handicapped by being relegated to using phone.
Health care industry as business rather than profession and mission is an abomination. Greed over people.
I think Amazon is too big and even Walmart can’t compete. Walmart seems to have one loss leader in a category and rest same as, or higher than, “competition”.
My issue is promoting small business for building middle class owners and hopefully getting back to competition as different and better rather than imitative.
Finally I do not see free competition, I see monopolies.
A free market allows for more people competing.
You teach what? Are you a Libertarian?
I am coming at this as a classicle conservative and a lawyer.