The hearing aid market is controlled by five companies that deliberately slowed government approval of over-the-counter hearing aids, blocking a major quality-of-life improvement for millions of Americans—an example of how concentrated oligopoly power directly prevents beneficial policy implementation.

FDR's first term relied on top-down vision without sufficient buy-in, and he corrected course by bringing an anti-monopoly agenda to the second term, generating necessary political support—this shows that even transformative leadership must eventually engage constituencies and power concerns.

Money in politics creates a fundamental distortion where politicians spend most of their time fundraising from wealthy donors rather than solving problems, causing them to unconsciously orient toward a mental model of their constituents as wealthy people rather than working people, thereby killing political ambition and dynamism on a day-to-day basis.

Koch brothers made a strategic decision in 2010 to threaten every Republican who used the word 'climate change' in a primary, transforming green energy from a bipartisan issue (as in McCain era) into a culture war weaponized at local levels to block wind and solar projects—representing a form of centralized corporate power crushing innovation.

Embracing oligarchic allies (like Bezos, Zuckerberg) on a short-term issue basis degrades the political system over time by concentrating power—even if you achieve short-term wins (defeating Trump), you're structurally weakening democracy by making your party dependent on oligarchic power.

The anti-monopoly movement should welcome people from industry backgrounds if they share the north star of standing up to monopolistic middlemen crushing wages and prices—Jonathan Kanter came from big law and did an incredible job as AAG of antitrust, overseeing Google's three monopoly findings and preparing a potential breakup.

Anti-monopoly is not anti-business but pro-business in the deeper sense: it clears away entrenched incumbents and allows new businesses to enter and innovate—the problem of monopoly chokepoints is that they disincentivize entrepreneurship because new entrants know they will be crushed, so they never try.

American corruption-fighting has focused on micro-level compliance checklists and audit procedures rather than structural solutions like ensuring there are many contractors and competitive bidding—the checklist approach hasn't rooted out corruption but has created slowness, making bureaucrats risk-averse.

Pharmacists emerged as the biggest opponents of the Kroger-Albertsons merger because they saw it as a fundamental threat to their livelihoods—this was unexpected to most observers, but reveals that the anti-monopoly frame's focus on power uncovers problems (power concentrating against workers) that outputs-focused analysis would miss.

Bernie Sanders, if president, would have experienced the economic stagnation as an emergency and used the tools of government to serve working people—suggesting that the difference between crisis and normal governance is psychological/political will, not institutional capacity.

Diapers became unnecessarily expensive during the pandemic, suggesting there should have been real innovation in diaper production (e.g., eco-diapers) but concentrated market power prevents new entrants from competing.

John Deere restricts farmers' ability to repair their own equipment, which is an anti-competitive practice that came to light through anti-monopoly movement investigation—this is representative of how focusing on power reveals problems that functional/output analysis misses.

Real estate board of New York has outsized power in state politics due to unlimited campaign spending and Citizens United, leading to giveaways and expensive-per-square-foot housing, while New York state government starved the subway system and outsourced everything to consultants, draining state capacity.

Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois were concerned about monopoly power as a route to understanding racism, suggesting anti-monopoly has historical grounding in civil rights analysis.

In emergency situations, leaders forget responsiveness to donors for combination of reasons: they care about people dealing with immediate crisis and are out of campaign mode when big donors aren't prominent in their mind.

Lena Khan used dynamic interpretation of antitrust law to challenge monopoly power despite resistance from progressive-aligned billionaires like Reed Hoffman, showing tensions within progressive coalition over strategy.

Geographic inequality in America has reached historic levels in the last 20 years, with places like Utica, New York totally left behind—this is weird and strange and should be treated as an urgent problem, yet has been normalized in political discourse.

The Green New Deal is not just a technocratic top-down vision but a vision of power, and 8 years ago (c. 2016) Klein and Teachout worked together on green new deal concepts that embedded this understanding—this is underappreciated in current discussions of green energy policy.

Hearing aid oligopoly in the U.S. market (dominated by five companies) blocked FDA deregulation of over-the-counter hearing aids for years, but when the Biden administration finally allowed OTC hearing aids, it became a life-changing product for millions of Americans, demonstrating how concentrated power prevents beneficial innovations.

FDR's first-term New Deal was top-down and failed to gain sufficient public buy-in, requiring him to pivot toward an anti-monopoly agenda; the Green New Deal, by contrast, is fundamentally about rebalancing power and is not merely technocratic vision but includes deep democratic buy-in.