When has the government had a positive effect on competition? And I am not talking about the government breaking up the monopoly it helped create in the first place ("Bell"), or doing something like deregulate the airline industry (which is government getting rid of its intervention into the market).

Perhaps you can argue the whole Standard Oil thing, but by the time the government got to breaking up Standard Oil, Standard Oil was already losing market share. There is speculation that the breakup of Standard Oil was masterminded by J.D. Rockefeller.

The government is elected by the people, for the people. Remember?

And a sucker is born every minute!

The regular people don't have a say in government. Government regulation is the last thing that is going to address the concerns of "working stiffs" or "small buisness". Government "regulation" just means that the government is selling "protection", like the mafia, to the big corporations. The corporations will have to work with the people in power to make the deal suitable to the political elite, but the little guy will never have any real say in the deal.

Once the people who are in power decide who is elegible for election, once they decide how funds for campaigning are going to be distributed, once they decide how groups are going to be gerimandered together to give certain parties advantage, and once the laws become so complicated they have almost endless regulatory power to punish non-supporters, and vast resources to give to reward their supporters, then there is no real Democracy. Democracy works on the small scale, but once you get to the size and power of the modern state, it becomes a meaningless abstraction.

More often then not, the regulation is designed to help the big corporations (in fact, the modern day mega-corporation couldn't exist without the government)... the regulation is used to make the cost of doing buisness too high for the little guy to afford the initial investment, or the liability too high that the little guy can't afford the insurance, or the fixed regulatory cost that doesn't scale for company size. The government takes land with eminent domain in order to give to the chain store.

If you look at markets that aren't regulated by the government (such as the drug trade), or under regulated by the government (computer software), you will see that the small guy has a huge advantage over the big guy. In the software industry, Microsofts biggest competitor is a product that doesn't cost anything and began as a hobby. Microsoft has such institutional entrophy that it is hard for them to compete on the merits of their product (and so now they compete using the government to enforce "intellectual property"). In the drug trade, no-one ever dominates for long before someone smaller comes along and starts shaking things up. It is not natural for large monopoly style corporations to exist, unless the government creates the regulatory infrastructure for it.

My alternative? Don't shop at Walmart. I have never walked into a Walmart, EVER, in my life... let alone purchased anything at a Walmart. I wouldn't be able to find the closest Walmart without looking it up online. And that is entirely accidental, without me trying to not shop at a Walmart. The vast majority of Walmart shoppers are suburbanites or urbanites who have plenty of other choices to shop besides Walmart. The overwelming vast majority of Americans live in urban or suburban areas and have access to plenty of other places to shop. Even if the people living in rural areas who are "forced" to shop at Walmart really mean that they would have to drive an extra 20 miles to a larger town - or would have to spend a little more money somewhere else - they are not forced, so much as can't be bothered.

Walmart has to be the easiest company in the world to boycott! They have a razor thin profit margin, so that it only takes a boycott of a small group of people in order to cut into their bottom line. (that is why religious groups, who actually take the time to boycott once in a while, are always getting Walmart to do whatever they want). Walmarts are only profitable if built where land values are low, and where there is lots of wide open space, which means for most American consumers, it is actually a bit of a drive to get to Walmart. And they have a reputation for being "low-class", which means that any affluent Americans, or middle-class Americans pretending to be affluent, are not going to be caught dead in anything as declasse as a Walmart.

In the Revolutionary War, a bunch of poorly armed and untrained American farmers managed to defeat the elite armies of the most powerful empire in history. And now American

And I hate Steam because it places undue restrictions on the games I own. For example, there's no guarantee that games that require Steam will be playable if Valve goes out of business (or gets bought out by some company that doesn't care about the user base). Because of this, I'm boycotting Valve -- I refuse to buy Half-Life 2, even though I'd certainly like to play it.

Odd that I couldn't find the word "steam" anywhere on this first page.

Maybe more Slashdotters are like me rather than you.