The one weird monopoly trick that gave us Walmart and Amazon and killed Main Street
I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).
Walmart didn't just happen. The rise of Walmart – and Amazon, its online successor – was the result of a specific policy choice, the decision by the Reagan administration not to enforce a key antitrust law. Walmart may have been founded by Sam Walton, but its success (and the demise of the American Main Street) are down to Reaganomics.
The law that Reagan neutered? The Robinson-Patman Act, a very boring-sounding law that makes it illegal for powerful companies (like Walmart) to demand preferential pricing from their suppliers (farmers, packaged goods makers, meat producers, etc). The idea here is straightforward. A company like Walmart is a powerful buyer (a "monopsonist" – compare with "monopolist," a powerful seller). That means that they can demand deep discounts from suppliers. Smaller stores – the mom and pop store on your Main Street – don't have the clout to demand those discounts. Worse, because those buyers are weak, the sellers – packaged goods companies, agribusiness cartels, Big Meat – can actually charge them more to make up for the losses they're taking in selling below cost to Walmart.
Reagan ordered his antitrust cops to stop enforcing Robinson-Patman, which was a huge giveaway to big business. Of course, that's not how Reagan framed it: He called Robinson-Patman a declaration of "war on low prices," because it prevented big companies from using their buying power to squeeze huge discounts. Reagan's court sorcerers/economists asserted that if Walmart could get goods at lower prices, they would sell goods at lower prices.
Which was true…up to a point. Because preferential discounting (offering better discounts to bigger customers) creates a structural advantage over smaller businesses, it meant that big box stores would eventually eliminate virtually all of their smaller competitors. That's exactly what happened: downtowns withered, suburban big boxes grew. Spending that would have formerly stayed in the community was whisked away to corporate headquarters. These corporate HQs were inevitably located in "onshore-offshore" tax haven states, meaning they were barely taxed at the state level. That left plenty of money in these big companies' coffers to spend on funny accountants who'd help them avoid federal taxes, too. That's another structural advantage the big box stores had over the mom-and-pops: not only did they get their inventory at below-cost discounts, they didn't have to pay tax on the profits, either.
MBA programs actually teach this as a strategy to pursue: they usually refer to Amazon's "flywheel" where lower prices bring in more customers which allows them to demand even lower prices:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaSwWYemLek
You might have heard about rural and inner-city "food deserts," where all the independent grocery stores have shuttered, leaving behind nothing but dollar stores? These are the direct product of the decision not to enforce Robinson-Patman. Dollar stores target working class neighborhoods with functional, beloved local grocers. They open multiple dollar stores nearby (nearly all the dollar stores you see are owned by one of two conglomerates, no matter what the sign over the door says). They price goods below cost and pay for high levels of staffing, draining business off the community grocery store until it collapses. Then, all the dollar stores except one close and the remaining store fires most of its staff (working at a dollar store is incredibly dangerous, thanks to low staffing levels that make them easy targets for armed robbers). Then, they jack up prices, selling goods in "cheater" sizes that are smaller than the normal retail packaging, and which are only made available to large dollar store conglomerates:
Writing in The American Prospect, Max M Miller and Bryce Tuttle1 – a current and a former staffer for FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya – write about the long shadow cast by Reagan's decision to put Robinson-Patman in mothballs:
They tell the story of Robinson-Patman's origins in 1936, when A&P was using preferential discounts to destroy the independent grocery sector and endanger the American food system. A&P didn't just demand preferential discounts from its suppliers; it also charged them a fortune to be displayed on its shelves, an early version of Amazon's $38b/year payola system:
They point out that Robinson-Patman didn't really need to be enacted; America already had an antitrust law that banned this conduct: section 2 of the the Clayton Act, which was passed in 1914. But for decades, the US courts refused to interpret the Clayton Act according to its plain meaning, with judges tying themselves in knots to insist that the law couldn't possibly mean what it said. Robinson-Patman was one of a series of antitrust laws that Congress passed in a bid to explain in words so small even federal judges could understand them that the purpose of American antitrust law was to keep corporations weak:
Both the Clayton Act and Robinson-Patman reject the argument that it's OK to let monopolies form and come to dominate critical sectors of the American economy based on the theoretical possibility that this will lead to lower prices. They reject this idea first as a legal matter. We don't let giant corporations victimize small businesses and their suppliers just because that might help someone else.
Beyond this, there's the realpolitik of monopoly. Yes, companies could pass lower costs on to customers, but will they? Look at Amazon: the company takes $0.45-$0.51 out of every dollar that its sellers earn, and requires them to offer their lowest price on Amazon. No one has a 45-51% margin, so every seller jacks up their prices on Amazon, but you don't notice it, because Amazon forces them to jack up prices everywhere else:
The Robinson-Patman Act did important work, and its absence led to many of the horribles we're living through today. This week on his Peoples & Things podcast, Lee Vinsel talked with Benjamin Waterhouse about his new book, One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America:
Towards the end of the discussion, Vinsel and Waterhouse turn to Robinson-Patman, its author, Wright Patman, and the politics of small business in America. They point out – correctly – that Wright Patman was something of a creep, a "Dixiecrat" (southern Democrat) who was either an ideological segregationist or someone who didn't mind supporting segregation irrespective of his beliefs.
That's a valid critique of Wright Patman, but it's got little bearing on the substance and history of the law that bears his name, the Robinson-Patman Act. Vinsel and Waterhouse get into that as well, and while they made some good points that I wholeheartedly agreed with, I fiercely disagree with the conclusion they drew from these points.
Vinsel and Waterhouse point out (again, correctly) that small businesses have a long history of supporting reactionary causes and attacking workers' rights – associations of small businesses, small women-owned business, and small minority-owned businesses were all in on opposition to minimum wages and other key labor causes.
But while this is all true, that doesn't make Robinson-Patman a reactionary law, or bad for workers. The point of protecting small businesses from the predatory practices of large firms is to maintain an American economy where business can't trump workers or government. Large companies are literally ungovernable: they have gigantic war-chests they can spend lobbying governments and corrupting the political process, and concentrated sectors find it comparatively easy to come together to decide on a single lobbying position and then make it reality.
As Vinsel and Waterhouse discuss, US big business has traditionally hated small business. They recount a notorious and telling anaecdote about the editor of the Chamber of Commerce magazine asking his boss if he could include coverage of small businesses, given the many small business owners who belonged to the Chamber, only to be told, "Over my dead body." Why did – why does – big business hate small business so much? Because small businesses wreck the game. If they are included in hearings, notices of inquiry, or just given a vote on what the Chamber of Commerce will lobby for with their membership dollars, they will ask for things that break with the big business lobbying consensus.
That's why we should like small business. Not because small business owners are incapable of being petty tyrants, but because whatever else, they will be petty. They won't be able to hire million-dollar-a-month union-busting law-firms, they won't be able to bribe Congress to pass favorable laws, they can't capture their regulators with juicy offers of sweet jobs after their government service ends.
Vinsel and Waterhouse point out that many large firms emerged during the era in which Robinson-Patman was in force, but that misunderstands the purpose of Robinson-Patman: it wasn't designed to prevent any large businesses from emerging. There are some capital-intensive sectors (say, chip fabrication) where the minimum size for doing anything is pretty damned big.
As Miller and Tuttle write:
The goal of RPA was not to create a permanent Jeffersonian agrarian republic of exclusively small businesses. It was to preserve a diverse economy of big and small businesses. Congress recognized that the needs of communities and people—whether in their role as consumers, business owners, or workers—are varied and diverse. A handful of large chains would never be able to meet all those needs in every community, especially if they are granted pricing power.
The fight against monopoly is only secondarily a fight between small businesses and giant ones. It's foundationally a fight about whether corporations should have so much power that they are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.
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You know how bullshit rent is? Elon Musk hasn't paid rent on Twitter's main offices in, like, 6 months, and has Twitter been evicted? Of course not. Apparently, when you're rich or a company, you can just tell your landlords to fuck off and the gov won't do shit to you.
These past few days, two words have been circulating everywhere: Jeffrey Epstein.
Of course, it's common knowledge that this billionaire is a pedophile, the head of a vast trafficking ring involving young girls for sexual purposes. I'm not going to list all his actions here. Honestly, I don't even feel capable of doing so, it's all so vile.
What I've been feeling these past few days, faced with the flood of information about the case, is intense dizziness and constant nausea. Nausea because the facts are absolutely horrific. Seeing photos of little girls, young girls, in the hands of these powerful men is absolutely revolting. But out of respect for the victims, I won't share them.
Dizziness because this case seems like a bottomless pit. Seeing all the people involved, directly or indirectly, is absolutely staggering. All these elites who participated in these pedocriminal acts, or who at least condoned them, make you desperately want to throw it all away.
The Epstein files released to the public reveal a great deal. They reveal the scale of a sex trafficking operation facilitated by vast financial resources and total impunity, reinforced by the social standing of all those involved.
They reveal photos and email exchanges, sometimes coded, sometimes highly explicit, which nevertheless only unveil a tiny fraction of the hell endured by hundreds (at least a thousand) of children and young adults.
But there is also everything these files don't reveal, yet are attributed to them.
There are the conspiracy theorists who rejoice in saying "we were right," echoing the infamous Pizzagate theory that a pedophile network existed around John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's former campaign manager. This theory was primarily propagated by Trump supporters to suggest that a pedophile conspiracy had taken place within the American left… The irony is palpable when one considers Trump's (unsurprising) involvement in the Epstein affair.
There were also the antisemites who used Epstein's origins (born into a Jewish family), as well as his proven ties to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, to revive the infamous racist conspiracy theory that Jews dominate the world.
The diversity of profiles among those involved in the case shows, on the contrary, that anyone can be a pedophile: regardless of gender, religion, origin, political orientation, skin color… Social class? I'll come back to that.
In the same vein of conspiracy theories, we find accusations of Satanism. And this is not insignificant. Often, in cases of sexual abuse that cannot be doubted (because all the evidence is there), explanations are sought. Either through a supposed "madness" or "impaired judgment" of the people involved. Or, when that doesn't hold water, they outright invoke the fantasies of secret cults. The crime is spiritualized; explanations are found in obscurantist narratives.
The banality of evil is rejected in favor of explanations that, while completely far-fetched, seem more satisfying to some than the simple (and horrific) truth.
Of course, all this information circulating on the internet reveals more about us as a society than about what actually happened in this case. In fact, when reality seems so unbearable, it's almost reassuring to want to find outlandish, even paranormal, explanations. It's like perpetuating the idea that pedophiles are monsters. Ultimately, it's a rather primitive reaction, I think. But it's not without its problems.
The reality is that by pathologizing sex offenders, by taking refuge in conspiracy theories, racist narratives, or even Satanic ones, we forget (more or less intentionally) the systemic nature of the situation. That's what these files reveal, but what we don't (see enough) of.
The Epstein case is, in fact, a tragically perfect example of what the accumulation of privilege and power allows. It shows the worst that patriarchy and capitalism can produce. Returning to the topic of class, it obviously played a major role in enabling these crimes to occur on such a large scale for so many years.
However, let's not forget that sexual crimes are committed in absolutely every social class. They are simply facilitated and, above all, more silenced among those who have the means to do so. And, of course, they have the means to buy the justice system to continue committing their horrors. This doesn't mean we can turn a blind eye to everything that happens everywhere except among the elites.
Finally, what these files don't explicitly state, but which should be everywhere, is that this pedophile network could have been dismantled decades ago.
Since 1996 (30 years!), victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been alerting the authorities. Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and questioned by the authorities numerous times in recent decades. But it wasn't until 2019 (and #MeToo surely played a role) that he was finally incarcerated, before dying in prison a few weeks later.
What these files scream about, but what goes unheard, is the complicity of an entire society and the silencing of the victims. Because Epstein could never have victimized so many people (over a thousand) if he hadn't been allowed to continue. If victims had been more encouraged to speak out, if the first woman who courageously spoke out had been believed, how many more could have been saved?
The way this case has been handled is a glaring example of the unjust system in which we live. Epstein took advantage of all his privileges to subjugate and abuse vulnerable young girls, relying on their lower social status to silence them.
He was able to leverage his connections with the most powerful men in the world to evade justice, even in death. He will never be brought to justice for his crimes.
Jeffrey Epstein is not a monster. He is a human being shaped by our system, which understood all its flaws and exploited them in the most horrific ways. But he is far from alone. Let's remember that the President of the world's leading power is also accused of very serious sexual violence, including by minors, which did not prevent him from being elected twice as President of the United States.
We know about him too. It's almost always the case. We know, but we say nothing. Why?
The answer is simple, and that's how I will end this (long) post.
Nothing is said because the voices of victims don't count.
What is the testimony of a young teenage girl worth compared to the voice of a rich and powerful man?
And more broadly, what is the value of the voices of women and children compared to those of men?
Absolutely nothing.
Today, things are changing. Because at least they are being heard. But are they being listened to? Still not.
It's everywhere. Powerful men, of course, whom we continue to protect in the name of the "presumption of innocence."
But also all those around us. And whom we also don't want to see.
Children forced to return to their fathers who commit incest… Women sent back to live with their abusers until they are killed…
The Epstein files don't say that it was a global (Jewish) conspiracy or a satanic cult.
The Epstein files reveal the full extent of our system's complicity in protecting powerful men (and a few women) at the expense of their victims.
And they show that even today, impunity persists, even if it is beginning to crumble.
As for me, the ones I think about the most are all those whose faces and bodies were exposed to the world. Those who, barely out of childhood, endured an unspeakable hell, and who have carried on their shoulders for the rest of their lives the weight of irreversible trauma. Those who spoke and were silenced. Those who never dared to say anything. Those who are no longer here to speak for themselves.
They deserve to hear the entire world say sorry.
Sorry for not listening.
Sorry for not believing you.
Sorry for failing to protect you.
https://x.com/sebstanarchive/status/1985904503804060139?t=_Uk56FWT2VqrAUKhdUAdOg&s=19 aaaaaaand we got a another biopic coming (maybe) 😅 oh man, he's going after STRONG topics. He really doesn't give a shit lmao, love him for that and hopefully this movie will come together. He did say he's been learning Spanish for it because he won't use AI (catch it Adrien Brody! 💅🏽)
Yeah, Tej told me about this earlier and I think it's super interesting! And yes, very intense subject once again, but obviously right up Sebastian's street!! Really hope he gets to make this one, fingers crossed 🤞🏻
Very proud of him for deciding to learn Spanish the old fashioned way. Also, my Chilean bestie, who is also a Spanish teacher, is outraged that she's not the one teaching Seb Spanish 😂
🎬Impunity será grabado en Chile, Londres y Madrid a finales del 2026 e inicios del 2027
🇲🇽De acuerdo con la producción de Impunity, la llegada de Ana de Armas y Sebastian Stan a Chile está prevista para inicios de Diciembre, luego el rodaje se moverá a Londres en Enero de 2027 y la etapa final se desarrollará en Madrid en Abril 2027.
🇺🇸 According to the production of Impunity, the arrival of Ana de Armas and Sebastian Stan in Chile is scheduled for early December, then filming will move to London in January 2027 and the final stage will take place in Madrid in April 2027.
