Sean Dengler.

When it comes down to how money is made in the United States, it is through net income, which is revenue minus expenses. Whether it is a business or home finances, net income is vital to Americans. If one spends more than one brings in over the course of the long term, this leads to consequences. Governments can also fall under this category.

Someone, somewhere, always has talking points about returning taxpayer money or how the government needs to be efficiently run. It is your money, and it needs to be protected or put to effective use. Big government spends too much of your money, and it needs to be reduced so Americans can keep more of their hard-earned money. Through this reasoning, this has become a way for more money to be returned to the public.

Unfortunately, when it comes to returning people’s money from monopolized industries and big business, this mentality is thrown out the window. A common belief is the free market will take care of the public despite industries where monopolization has raised prices. In agriculture, one fertilizer company is the de facto price market for each major nutrient (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium), this means the farmer is going to take the price whatever these consolidated companies are going to give. A farmer is not in a competitive market nor on an even playing field, leading to them keeping less of their hard-earned money.

Go to the independent pharmacy chain. They are forced to work with three monopolistic, uncompetitive pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). These independent pharmacists will pay for a drug for a patient expecting to be reimbursed by the PBMs. This is how these pharmacists plan out their expenses, but the PBM can refuse to pay the rate the pharmacist expects. This leads to pharmacists being at the whims of these monopolistic PBMs that reduce the pharmacists’ net income because they have the market power to do so.

For the regular consumer who has an Amazon Prime membership, they are also feeling the effects of big business and the lack of their hard-earned money being returned to them. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, any business that wants to create a competitive market online is blocked from doing so under Amazon’s “fair pricing policy.” While other selling platforms have lower fees coming out of a business owner’s pockets, Amazon’s fees have continued to rise. Their algorithms punish business owners who sell on other platforms at lower prices by demoting their products in its search results or making them ineligible for the buy-box.

Leaving Amazon Prime for greener pastures is a bad business decision when the majority of households in the United States have belonged to Prime. This hurts not only the business owner, but it is a tax on the rest of the internet since business owners cannot reduce their prices elsewhere on the internet. Consumers and business owners are seeing either higher expenses or lower income due to this monopolization of the market. This is less money being returned to the American public.

A “free market” is not a free market unless it is a competitive market. This is what is best for the American public. With all the talk of returning money to the American public, it is important to do it from all parts of people’s lives. The economy is not a separate, untouchable part of society where the free market will solve everything. Our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations recognized when too few firms gained too much market power, this negatively impacted society and people’s pocketbooks. Iowa was the first state to pass an antitrust statute in 1888. This came before the federal government passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.

America has broken up a fertilizer trust before by creating competitive markets in the mid-twentieth century, and it can be done again. America has also broken up lethargic intermediary companies like PBMs before. America also broke up Standard Oil, which operated an integrated network many had to work within, like Amazon Prime, and we can do it again. America needs antitrust. Not only to take on these large companies monopolizing various industries, but it is also needed to let you hold onto your hard-earned money.

Sean Dengler is a writer, comedian, now-retired beginning farmer, and host of the Pandaring Talk podcast who grew up on a farm between Traer and Dysart. You can reach him at sean.h.dengler@gmail.com.