Brief comment: it is interesting to note that in all his voluminous writings, he never described what Communism might look like, concretely.
Here is my own version of “Communism”. Because this exists, it makes me superior in at least that respect to him. Frankly, anyone who took the time to write virtually anything remotely possible would be his superior. He discounted human agency, and hence the need for planning. That is stupid. Very stupid.
I am giving serious thought to describing my book as the pathway to “Communism”. I really do think we would all be happiest as a nation of shopkeepers. Napoleon offered that as an insult, with respect to the English, but he himself was an autocrat and butcher, leading an army of thieves.
What large multi-nationsl corporations tend to do is create competition across continents, where everyone is getting squeezed price-wise. This puts innovation into overdrive, which is good, since we get more for less, but it also tends to decrease profits, foster financial instability in some, and support on-going movement in the direction of monopolistic control, as the big fish eat the small fish. I suspect things are tighter in that regard today than most of us would suspect. It was long seemed to me that the oil industry operates as a de facto cartel. I could be wrong.
Yet, if things are produced locally and consumed locally, then competition happens locally and much more congenially. That is, at least, what happens in my imagination; and talking to old-timers, that seems to have been the case 40 years ago. You bought from local companies, and they would scrap a bit amongst themselves, but nobody was–usually–trying to drive anyone else out of business.
It’s a delicate balance. To the extent you let the government step in to prevent monopoly formation as a result of competitive success you transfer power from the private sector to the public. Yet, to the extent monopolies exist, they detract from competition.
No final, philosophically complete answer is possible. All cases have to be dealt with on their own, but I would submit the following heuristic is always helpful: concentrations of power are always bad, and diffusion of power is always good. We needed a strong Federal Government principally for national defense, and to serve as judge in disputes between the several States. Beyond that, both the letter and spirit of the law were intended to grant States the right to make their own rules.
I have said this many times, but I see no reason Minnesota could not copy Denmark, and I see no reason Texas could not copy the Wild West.