I obviously have some libertarian leaning views but this is my favorite to defend.

"What about the roads?!"

"Oh the ones full of potholes, riddled with traffic, and the shoulder covered in litter? The free ones that you already pay car sales tax, insurance tax, license tax, registration tax, DOT tax for the road maintenance, and the breaking road rules tax? Those roads?"

Studied a lot of economics in my years. Let me give you what I believe is the truth:

Monopolies in a capitalist system function differently than the monopolies we know. Take a couple obvious ones: Auto, Airline, Telecom, Utility, Healthcare, Tech, Rail.

They all have some sort of government involvement, whether it be: regulatory, direct funding, heavy taxation, favorable legislation, the list goes on.

They create artificially high barriers to entry, so if you or I wanted to create our own car company, it wouldn't be feasible.

THAT is why monopolies (in the traditional sense) are allowed to exist (and are even promoted) in a capitalist-lite economy.

In a true capitalist system, a monopoly would only be allowed to exist if it continued to provide a value to its consumers. And even that isn't enough to stop something bigger and better from coming along. Cheers.

Forgot to add the the U.S. dollar has lost 96% of its value since 1913. This fact is indisputable, likely even worse now as this stat has been around for a few yrs?

Any student of history who has actually done their homework and really read on the topic should be able to tell you that the "Robber Baron" era was made possible by a lot of things we'd now find quite objectionable today. The railroads were built with cheap imported labor (Chinese, Irish, etc). Their pay wasn't high. Their working conditions were abysmal and industrial accidents resulting in death or serious injury were common. This is before unions existed so workers had next to no rights. If they tried to bargain for them, they'd be crushed by hired mercenaries or bought-off police. And of course, we didn't do much of anything about industrial waste. Just dump it in the river. This was 60 years before the famous Lake Eire fire where the lake was so filled with trash and oil-based pollution that the surface of the lake literally caught fire.

JD Rockefeller was an absolute mercenary, and an arrogant, egotistical ass who claimed that God had inspired him and had granted him the right to run his competition out of business and maintain a 98% control over the world's kerosene and petroleum trade while he accumulated more wealth than more than half of the countries on Earth for himself.

Andrew Carnegie was no gem either as his safety record at his steel mills showed... and JP Morgan, the king of all the robber barons, said forget the hard work of actually producing a product of value. He took over the banking industry and bought himself his own President. So, no Zuckerberg wasn't the first to own a President. JP Morgan bought McKinley (#25).

There were a lot of abuses of the so-called golden era of capitalism because fundamentally when too much wealth and power are concentrated in any man or group of men, it will inevitably lead to corruption and abuse of that power. There are no angels. Goverment's role is to act as a referee specifically to check this kind of power. It has taken us ~150 years to learn some of these lessons, and with Big Tech and Big Pharma, we're still learning we don't have the adequate checks and balances in place yet.

The problem is we are post-scarcity right now. All "scarcity" its artificially created (by the big or little G).

Communism/Socialism have noble goals, I will say that much. But it will never work for a multitude of reasons. Capitalism within a Libertarian system of government is the best way to protect yourself from both the evils of government and big corporations.