>> Back in the days of Monopolies and Robber Barons it was SOP for huge economic players with unlimited assets to dump their products on the market at prices below the cost of manufacturing in order to drive the competition out of business to create a working monopoly and then increase the price of that product to as high as the market would bear as a sole supplier <<
You appear to be taking obsolete economic history lessons from Ida Tarbell and the assorted leftwing journalists and academics who followed in her footsteps.
But in fact, starting back in the 1950’s, careful economic research by Aaron Director and his acolytes like John Magee at the University of Chicago Law School showed that the once-widely-accepted model of “predatory pricing” — as supposedly practiced by Standard Oil and other “robber baron” companies — was supported neither by logical analysis nor by hard evidence. Moreover, the findings of those scholars and their students still stand. They have never been refuted by careful research.
So you may bash “monopolies and robber barons” to your heart’s content. But you won’t find any support among free-market thinkers like Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams and similar leading lights of the pro-market, pro-capitalist and pro-liberty persuasion
The Saudis just recently crashed the price of crude oil with the goal of putting American frackers out of business. The attempt failed but only after it almost destroyed the emerging American fracking industry and forced many frackers into bankruptcy.
The Saudis and OPEC countries then tried to buy up as many bankrupt fracking operations as they could - as well as much of the transportation and refining infrastructure, so perhaps the days of predatory trade practices are not as remote as you seem to suggest.
Furthermore, older economic assumptions and models need to adjusted for the rise of communist economic superpower looking to rapidly industrialize it's once non existent economy using aggressive and often predatory export policies.
In China, economic policy is considered war by other means and the Chinese are using their export policies to build up their economies while simultaneously destroying the economies of their competitors.
Additionally, in Communist China there are laws against large foreign transfers of currency and the only way for most Chinese to own private property is own a manufacturing facility. A huge fraction of Chinese manufacturing companies are set up with the primary goal of sheltering income in only available vehicle for sheltering assets as private property.
Like the old pre Reagan tax reform American tax shelter schemes, these companies are actually structured to sell products at acceptable losses and lose money to shelter assets in the only safe harbor.
It is impossible for American companies to compete with Chinese manufacturing companies intentionally structured and chartered to sell products at a loss
Classical text book and academic economic theories simply do not account for the new realities we face. Classical economic analysis also does not take into account massive, crippling budget deficits driven, to a large degree, by welfare and disability payments made to the 14 million or so able bodied American workers driven out of the labor pool by Obama era policies.
Regardless, the problems we face with the destruction of key American industries are strategic in nature and we simply cannot allow out steel and aluminum industries to be wiped out by foreign competition regardless of any stand alone economic analysis that does not factor this into account.
While basic and fundamental economic principles have not changed, the parameters and calculus of the economic analysis has changed radically due to the huge and rapid economic transformations we have seen in the world economy.
Hawthorn is right. Schools and universities are steeped in Leftist Keynesian, anti-free-market doctrine, assimilated by the unwary and gulible. But the fact is monopolies are a product of the subsides and bribes of the federal government, the REAL Robber Barons.
The self-correction of pricing and innovation in the open competition of supply and demand in the free market will mitigate such foolishness. As usual, government is the culprit of our economic woes, then, as now.