Ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s said in a lawsuit filed Wednesday that parent company Unilever has silenced its attempts to express support for Palestinian refugees, and threatened to dismantle its board and sue its members over the issue.
The lawsuit is the latest sign of the long-simmering tensions between Ben & Jerry’s and consumer products maker Unilever. A rift erupted between the two in 2021 after Ben & Jerry’s said it would stop selling its products in the Israeli-occupied West Bank because it was inconsistent with its values, a move that led some to divest Unilever shares.
The ice cream maker then sued Unilever for selling its business in Israel to its licensee there, which allowed marketing in the West Bank and Israel to continue. That lawsuit was settled in 2022.
I completely agree with you that the results (monopolies and oligopolies) are undesirable, and you’re doing a great job of explaining why the results are undesirable. But you’re not explaining why you think monopolies and oligopolies are not the natural outcome of a free market. The free market is not a good thing.
I agreed that they are the natural outcome, in the absence of effective regulation. Sans means without.
Capitalism inherently concentrates wealth, and as wealth concentrates, it builds upon itself while seeking out novel opportunities to deepen influence. We see this phenomenon in modern economic scenarios as individuals gain the ability to co-opt political forces, and create larger and larger wealth watersheds.
In other words, the existence of billionaires is a symptom of a broken system- one that has NOT effectively been regulated. They become monopolistic entities unto themselves. Billionaire brands then gain further leverage via network effects, creating a snowball that only government intervention can safely defuse. It doesn’t matter if one billionaire is “good,” nor one politician. As Edwards Deming famously said, “a bad system will beat a good person, every time.”