It's funny to me (not funny haha, more like funny sob) that conservatism has delivered all the things we were told were bad about the Soviet bloc when I was a kid—one store to buy everything, a lack of substantive choices as a consumer, subscription and rental over ownership, endless faceless bureaucracy everywhere; but since it all happened in the name of capital its all totally fine, nothing to see here. I know I'm stating something very obvious, but it's chilling and no one seems to talk about it. Maybe because it's so dumb and obvious. Sorry.

Everything terrible has roots in Reaganomics. That the descriptive "Reagan Republican" has been softened to something implying sane and reasonable when juxtaposed with Trumpism, rather than the mercenary war that it was/is waged upon those who are not rich, really grates upon my soul.

As I learned many years ago from The Boondocks, Ronald Reagan is the Devil.

F.T.C. Sues Largest U.S. Alcohol Distributor for Illegal Pricing (gift link):

The agency filed the antitrust lawsuit under a 1936 law that prohibits sellers from offering better prices to some buyers and not others, often at the expense of smaller businesses, without a justification based on differences in the cost of distribution. The law, called the Robinson-Patman Act, had not been enforced in more than two decades.

That's the same law referenced in the Atlantic article, the non-enforcement of which spurred the creation of food deserts.