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I'm genuinely curious about one thing. How can you make statements like this, while still being able to see what you can see with your own eyes? What I mean is that in the past, with relatively minimal regulations, there was a healthy and functioning market. Some companies, and individuals like the Carnegies, managed to create immense monopolistic empires but they were the exception rather than the rule. And today? We're rapidly converging on there being nothing but one mega-corporation that owns everything in places like America.

I agree your analysis is correct, in so much as that in the free market companies can engage in dubious behavior to drive competitors out of business. So what are you missing? I think two things.

#1) What happens next in the regulation-free system? The large company can't keep their prices artificially low indefinitely. They need to bring them back up, at which point other companies can come right back. In general the price of bad behavior is expensive and the gains liminal. There will always be bad actors, but the invisible hand does create a strong incentive for simply offering a better product instead of trying to be the scummiest.

#2) In our system these hoops and hurdles provide an effective barrier to entry for big business, which ironically not only enables and protects but overtly incentivizes bad behavior. You have never tried to start or run a business. How do I know? Because you still think all these regulations are a good idea. There are a million and one hoops and hurdles you need to jump through to run a business. And the vast majority of them have little to nothing to do with actual safety. And these rules are constantly changing. Regulatory compliance has become so complex that it imposes a tremendous burden on any company with low to moderate revenue. But big multinational corporations? They have entire legal teams on standby for a fraction of a percent of their entire revenue. They can comply, fight, or change regulations as they deem fit - not only through legal means but also by simply buying congressmen who come surprisingly cheaply relative to the revenues involved. And I haven't even hit on regulatory capture - over time you gradually end up having these very corporations often end up running the regulatory schemes.

In our system have you ever noticed it's often the biggest [cnn.com], scummiest [reuters.com], corporations (and banks [bitcoin.com])calling for more regulation? It's because it's weaponized.

Regulations, in a perfect world, are obviously a good thing. But we live in a world where everything gets corrupted. So the question is, does a corrupted free market offer better outcomes? Or does a corrupted free market with corrupted regulation offer better outcomes? And in my opinion, I think clearly evidenced by reality, is that the former offers the better outcomes.