"President Donald Trump has an opportunity to follow in former President Teddy Roosevelt’s footsteps.
Will Donald Trump follow TR’s lead?
...Roosevelt built a strong reputation by going after the trusts, huge combinations that placed control of entire industries in the hands of one or a few men.
He broke up John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, the Google of its day.
He shut down J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Co., which would have monopolized rail transportation in much of the United States.
And he pursued numerous other cases (45 in all) that broke up monopolies and returned competition to markets....Monopolies are an economic and political threat
Big monopolies aren’t just an economic threat:
They’re a political threat.
Because they’re largely free of market constraints, they don’t have to put all their energy into making a better product for less money.
Instead, they put a lot of their energy into political manipulation to protect their monopoly.
...Today, things look a lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s era.
A few monopolies occupy much of the tech world: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google — FANG, as they’re often abbreviated.
They gobble up potential competitors, as Facebook did with WhatsApp and Instagram.
...Facing a similar situation, Roosevelt declared, “When aggregated wealth demands what is unfair, its immense power can be met only by the still greater power of the people as a whole.”
...With today’s economy dominated by the FANG companies, will Donald Trump — another brash New Yorker who found himself in the White House — follow TR’s lead?
Perhaps a better question is, why wouldn’t he?"
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