It's allowed for two reasons.

First, if you suggest that any company's monopoly be returned to the people, who liscensed it to them in the first place, then everyone thinks that you're Stalin. Yes, being against the government granting a private party the authority to come dig up your land, run lines under them, and take profits from your land without paying you a dime of rent, is apparently the red Soviet menace incarnate. So reason number one, Americans like to lick the boots of their elite. Or ruling class, or business leaders, captains of industry (that one's a laugh), or whatever you want to call them. Wish I could figure out why.

Second, even if hypothetically the American people decided tomorrow to oust the monopolies, that still doesn't mean the net would be saved. Going from your example, if you don't want car companies owning gas stations, then a lot of people will see you as a God-fearing capitalist who opposes vertical integration.

But if you want your pipe to just be a dumb pipe, then you're one of the horsemen of the infocalypse. You must be guilty of something. Citizen, this tranmission is using non-standard port numbers for all civilian purposes, and the Ministry of Internal Security has been unable to determine the purpose of these transmissions. Also, they appear to be encrypted. Do you have an encryption permit and a valid business use for encrypting these transmissions?

Yeah anyway, there's of course the obvious solution to this crap. New amendment:

All monopolies, including, but not limited to, utilities and intellectual monopolies, granted to private parties by any government within United States territory are hereby rescinded. In the case of utilities, all authority vested in any utility established by a grant of monopoly shall hereby be vested in the government which granted it. Henceforth, no government within United States territory shall have any authority to grant any monopoly to a private party.

Boom. Done.

Anyway, we as a nation are going to have to go a lot further into some kind of Stalinist/Maoist hybrid before we realize (and have the balls to admit) that we've made some big mistakes. We can't have any progress until then.

I recently read an article which compared the lifetime earnings of someone who earns an average amount with a high school degree versus someone who earns an average amount with a Bachelors degree. The conclusion was that when one factors in lost earnings and student loans, the person who got a job right out of high school will do better on average than someone who gets a Bachelors degree.

Well, lots of problems here.

This reminds me of something I say about Sarbox, email retention, paper correspondence retention, etc. Now this article is talking about the UK, but I know this happens in the US. Considering we inherited a lot of their crappy legal system, it wouldn't surprise me if they have this too.

We have a policy of charging potential defendants with collecting, retaining, investigating, and providing potential evidence against them. Now, besides this being a braindead policy that could only come from the mind of a lawyer, it's, IMO, cleary a violation of the 5th amendment.

This, from what I know, is kind of how it works in medical studies. For example, if a local restaraunt gets a health complaint, what happens? Do they "swear" they've double checked everything and found "no violations"? And then the local health board just accepts that? Hell no, they get a visit from a health inspector. Now I'll agree that these kinds of systems are prone to abuse themselves, but any form of self-policing is just ridiculous on its face.

Yet, with a medical study, these companies certify that their drugs "pose no serious side effects". ORLY? Drugco said that? Well, then I guess Ritaxiloril must be safe right?

2nd, and this is another big obvious one that I push, abolish IP. In fact, abolish all government-granted monopolies. It has the nice side effect of abolishing all monopolies. That reduces the incentive to pull this kind of crap.

3rd, academia needs to grow a pair and throw off the journal middle men. Journals should be public domain, as well as all source data. Anything less shouldn't qualify as science, and shouldn't be treated as such.

But a world like that wouldn't leave much room for parasites, so I guess I'm just dreaming.

But that would imply that they aren't property. We can't be having that.

If you put it in the peoples' heads that IP, rather than someone's private property, is only a monopoly granted by the government, well then they might just want to abolish it. Better to leave them thinking that anyone who wants to abolish "Intellectual Property" is a communist.

A communist who hates them for their freedom.