Part of an ongoing series on questioning modern day capitalism policies
“Let’s Break Up Facebook like the Feds did to AT&T! We were so better off than having that pesky Ma Bell. So what if the markets would price them out? The free market failed anyways!” – Stereotypical American Consumer
The Too Big To Fail industry of Silicon Valley is going to pop and will most likely explode in the next several years. This industry began really around the time AT&T was broken up in the mid 1980s, and while many think the breakup of AT&T was a smart move, where is the same anger against companies like Alphabet’s Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other big companies?
Does anyone realize that Mark Zuckerberg feels like he’s richer than God or that he own platform acts a service to their own employees? How are employees there? Do they feel valued? Are they being abused or mistreated? Research shows that Millennials aren’t verse in retirement, how can they build that if the companies don’t support them? Where the hell is HR?
AT&T was not a perfect company but had good-faith intentions to serve the customer, and while older episodes of Saturday Night Live often mocked Ma Bell, if your internet goes down, whose going to come to your house on Christmas to restore it? Whose going to be there during a hurricane? Oh right, the techs insist to be like corporate employees so they can have all their time off when the people they claim they serve is entitled to have the same holidays like everyone else.
Nobody want’s to bust their ass anymore. I blame excessive capitalism. Things cheap, easy to purchase, easy to break, and whine about the quality and not following an age ol American norm of “personal responsibility” or “caveat emptor: let the buyer beware”. Sadly anyone trying to reason “the American Consumer”, will have no luck to teach them basic supply and demand and the cost of running a business without hoarding cash. The public believes acting like high school students hazing each other for your hard earned dollar is what kept this economy flowing. It’s not to say those enterprises were perfect or government intervention came in.
What drove AT&T’s prices down was unfortunately a system to make reliable telephones that one had to lease and rent, and in fact to keep maintaince cost down to those ol rotaries, was to make them bullet proof. Perhaps it was shady, but what was wrong with that? After some disruption via FCC policy, AT&T did get some competition. The phone service was so reliable, it was the envy of the world, people who made telephones and equipment had a job. It was made mostly in America. Where is that anger?