Capital Wants a Monopoly

Larry Salibra argues that the announced merger between US food-delivery platforms Instacart and DoorDash reflects a broader tendency for American markets to consolidate into duopolies or monopolies. In his view, this outcome is driven by investors’ interests: monopolies can extract economic rents from customers and thereby maximize shareholder value. He contrasts that incentive with the consumer benefits of vigorous competition, which he says is often treated by business leaders as undesirable because it is difficult and less profitable.

Salibra calls for the United States to establish a powerful market regulator comparable to China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR). He credits SAMR with generally curbing monopolistic behavior among technology platforms and fostering more consumer-friendly competition. As an example, he points to its past intervention against e-commerce platforms, which included billions of dollars in fines and orders to stop anti-competitive practices. He contends that the United States lacks an equivalent agency with meaningful enforcement powers because shareholders, founders, venture capitalists, and Wall Street benefit from concentrated markets. These groups, he argues, would use appeals to due process and the rule of law - and political lobbying - to resist strong regulation, though their underlying concern is protecting profits from competition.