A Boring Dystopia

Canadian here. No, you fucking dont. We basically have 2 major players (Loblaws and Sobeys), and they were caught red-handed fixing the price of bread a few years ago, and faced next to no punishment for it.

There's no good argument in allowing mergers of companies that are already large enough to be publicly traded at all.

Honestly the whole private shareholder parasite that produces nothing, aside from the chips from their last trip to the exploitation casino, and demands and gets almost every net cent of profit produced is the root cause of most of humanity's great crises. Value/capital earned/made should be tied largely to the quantity/quality/expertise of contributed LABOR, not passive speculative investment, aka gambling, often with loaded market pressure dice and marked insider information cards.

There's a damned good reason, prior to the Reaganomics/Jack Welch giveaway, that the normal business model was customers first, employees second, investors third: because without the first two no one makes anything, and the third only consumes and demands like petulant infants demanding a baba.

Now it's investors first and only, which is not sustainable, just look around at all the mergers enshittifying every economic sector's ability to produce the goods and services they existed to provide in the first place.