Apple: Think Diffident. Their corporate censorship, yet another reason a diverse marketplace is important.

This article goes in detail through the ways that Apple's obsessive, narrow-minded, self-justifying censorship of what can be done on or even sold for the iTouch/iPhone/iPad platform has hurt us all. Including, I think, Apple. And, even more importantly, how this dynamic hobbles many other parts of our oligopoly-dominated society.

There is a dangerous tendency on the left, not to mention among Tea Partiers, to try to explain everything corporations cause in terms of what enriches the people at the top. In other words, to presume that when some corporate-caused action hurts our society, the suits somehow gain equivalently to how we lose. If ten of us are in a boat and I pour salt on all the food, nobody gains. On the macro scale, the world is very rarely a place where each gain and loss is tidily evened out. And until people let go of that childish zero-sum game way of looking at the world, they'll never have any hope of accurately seeing what happens or why.

The truth is even worse. Much of what they do hurts even them. Sometimes choices are made out of fear or confusion or simple transitory power games that will be forgotten next week but whose consequences will live on for years or even decades.

And while we can happily natter on about how corporations "should" be virtuous or how we "should" be able to regulate them into pursuing the public interest, as far as I'm concerned, that's a side discussion. The most important response to the anxious, power-grasping, meddling of corporations in how a given market works is to fight that control. The control ANY small number of buyers or sellers or distributors have over that market. To create a market with many buyers and sellers and distributors.

If one company controls a market, that market will become inefficient, even for the profit maximization of that corporation. Same thing if two or three corporations share that control between them. Any detailed review of the finances of American car companies illustrates this very, very well.

My conclusion? When I see one company dominating a market, I am opposed to it. Same thing for two orthree or four companies. I don't care if it's Google or Ben&Jerry's or Apple. Oligopoly hurts the public interest. Every time. EVERY time.