How Corporations Can Block Abundance

By Jen Howard, the DOT's first-ever Chief Competition Officer

Editor’s note: The below piece was originally published in ProMarket. We strongly encourage you to follow their work for other excellent thought pieces and commentary on competition and economic policy.

Additionally, The Economic Populist will not be posting a Weekly Rewind this week due to the holiday on Thursday.

---

Americans are frequently told we live in an era of unprecedented choice, convenience, and technological capacity. Yet, for the majority of us, this promise of abundance feels increasingly out of reach. Even when the economy appears to be booming, millions struggle to stay afloat. Rents continue to rise, essentials like groceries and medicine remain locked behind unaffordable prices, and jobs seem harder to find. Median wages have stalled, while household debt piles up.

As the economic pain deepens, urgent questions about the cause of the cost-of-living crisis have sparked an intense public discussion. The differing camps see scarcity as a key driver, but diverge on the culprit creating it. The abundance movement argues that government overregulation, through sluggish permitting and bureaucratic red tape, drives up costs by stifling production. Meanwhile, populists contend that corporate concentration has eroded widespread prosperity and that the government’s fault lies in its failure to keep companies in check.

In a recent poll from Demand Progress, 81.6 percent of voters surveyed said they want leaders who break up monopolies, compared to just 47.3 percent who prioritize cutting government red tape. This poll suggests that the public supports a populist approach that confronts corporate power more than an abundance agenda that sidesteps it. It reflects a growing recognition: while bureaucratic inefficiencies certainly exist, corporations are blocking our abundance because scarcity is profitable.

The scarcity that so many Americans feel in their daily lives is not by accident, it’s by design. Companies block abundance by strategically reducing output and access to goods and services. Artificial scarcity is a business strategy. One that prioritizes profit maximization over widespread availability, ensuring that demand consistently outstrips supply. This deliberate restriction allows companies to command higher prices and increase their profit margins.

Corporations manufacture and maintain scarcity

In a truly competitive market, manufacturing scarcity can be a challenge. If a company attempts to artificially limit production or inflate prices, that unmet demand becomes a prime opportunity. Competitors will eagerly step in to fill the gap, offering more supply or a better deal, thus unraveling the attempt at artificial scarcity. In this dynamic environment, countless companies vie for customers, expanding the market and responding to customer feedback to keep their business. The constant pressure of competition ensures that supply can generally meet demand absent natural constraints.

Concentration makes it easier to manufacture scarcity. When a few large players dominate the market, they can manipulate the fundamental dynamics of supply and demand and charge high economic rents. They can implicitly or explicitly collude to divide and conquer, reduce capacity, and fix prices or wages. There’s less incentive for any single firm to increase production or lower costs, as doing so would only drive down profits for everyone. They can decide to stop serving cost-conscious communities to focus on customers who can afford premium prices, thereby maximizing revenue. By skimping on features, improvements, or overall quality, they can reduce their costs and still retain customers, even as they ignore complaints. In short, less competition means big companies can make more money by producing and spending less. Wealth becomes concentrated as industries consolidate.

Dominant firms maintain artificial scarcity by wielding monopoly power over the market. They gatekeep access, blocking new entrants and preventing participants from leaving for competitors. They lock in exclusive deals that curb rivals’ expansion by denying them crucial partnerships and resources. Monopolists have large bureaucracies that typically hinder their own capacity for innovation, so they buy or bury more nimble firms to arrest any breakthroughs they don’t own. Their vast intellectual property portfolios create legal impediments to challengers looking to improve on their products or prices. These monopoly tactics stifle the growth of smaller competitors and prevent new disruptors from emerging, effectively closing off private sector remedies for manufactured scarcity.

Concentration creates real-world roadblocks to abundance

My time working on competition policy in various federal agencies offered firsthand insight into the ways that concentrated power in the private sector creates real-world roadblocks to abundance. A prime example is the airline industry. Flying in America is such an ordeal thanks to deregulation, which promised more choice, but left us with four airlines in control of over two-thirds of the U.S. industry. The big four have consolidated their power by buying up competitors, building fortress hubs, and monopolizing access to key airport gates, flight times, and routes. Rather than making air travel more abundant, they have cut service to cities across the country and made the experience worse, with chronically delayed flights, shrinking seat space, inflated ticket prices, and junk fees.

Take housing, a key focus in the abundance debate. While zoning restrictions can create real local impediments, concentration has become a serious barrier to affordable housing nationwide. Fewer builders means fewer homes. Private investors are buying up units across major cities and then leaving some vacant as they wait for prices to rise. Families are locked out of home ownership while Wall Street’s capital squats in silence. These players are also converting single-family homes into rentals, and on track to control 40 percent of them by the end of this decade. People are stuck paying perpetual rent instead of building long-term wealth through equity. Meanwhile, big landlords are inflating housing costs by colluding to make rent outrageously expensive.

It’s the same with healthcare. After decades of mergers, roughly 80 percent of hospital markets are concentrated. This means there are fewer places that serve the sick. Hospitals can charge more for life-saving care and pay less to the people providing it. Stories of critical hospital closures and extreme, profit-boosting cuts sharply illustrate the deadly impact of manufactured scarcity. Three drug middlemen control nearly 80 percent of U.S. prescriptions, limiting access and making medicine more expensive. While publicly funded research often drives initial breakthroughs, drug companies patent these discoveries then block cheaper generics to maintain monopoly prices. People are backed into a corner because there is no walk-away price for the medicine that keeps you alive.

Corporate power shapes the economy

All of this is made possible by an economic and political system that corporations have spent decades reshaping to suit their needs. They flood the halls of power with money not just to avoid regulation, but to bend it in their favor. They fight for loopholes, complexity, and delay. And when they break the law, they can afford to tie up enforcement in court for years, continuing to pocket profits by stalling penalties. As a result, we live in an economy that has quietly redefined freedom as the power of the wealthy to set the terms for the rest.

The abundance movement rightly asks why government processes for permitting, infrastructure, and innovation are slow and costly. These are important questions. As someone who spent 15 years working in the federal bureaucracy, I’ve personally seen many of these issues and could list countless others. To build a faster, better government, we must identify what works and fix what doesn’t. But we can’t ignore who benefits from the current system. Without addressing corporate power, the same companies pushing for abundance will keep erecting barriers to maintain the scarcity they profit from.

How do we move forward? Not by doubling down on false choices between growth and fairness. We need shared abundance, not one that pools at the top while rationing what’s left. That requires us to widen our focus beyond how much we can produce, to grapple with the ownership, control, and distribution that determines who receives it.

Pathways to shared abundance

We start by challenging the ways our economy makes scarcity an organizing principle and consolidation inevitable. Robust antitrust enforcement is a key tool, but we also require broader cures. We need to place sensible limits on what and how much any entity can control, to stop large firms and private investors from hoarding key assets. This opens up more ownership opportunities for the rest of us to build wealth.

To discourage artificial scarcity, we should incentivize productivity instead of extraction. We can reward companies that open up their innovations to the public. Attaching conditions to government resources, civic privileges, and taxpayer funds ensures that our support creates public benefits not monopoly windfalls. We need to close loopholes that give advantages to big companies that dodge taxes over the small businesses and workers who pay their share.

We can lower costs by investing in public competitors like generic drug manufacturers to ensure that monopolies aren’t dictating prices. Community-owned enterprises like municipal broadband and public grocery stores can effectively address the critical service gaps left by the private sector. We can expand low-cost public choices for basics like housing, childcare, and healthcare and consider more targeted price caps on essentials to ensure that no one is forced to live without.

We need to dismantle the traps that corporations set to gatekeep and exploit. To restore people’s freedom and agency, we should ban unfair take-it-or-leave-it contract terms, like those that lock you into jobs, silence you, deny you legal recourse, or change unilaterally. We can guarantee economic rights that give people real power in business dealings, like the right to repair your stuff, the right to avoid or easily cancel subscriptions, the right to say no to digital surveillance, and the right to get help from a human.

Finally, we can draw a firm line against practices that treat the economy like a casino. That includes banning buybacks and layoffs for the sake of shareholder gains, and outlawing shady tactics that help companies collude. We need to put an end to extractive investor schemes that siphon wealth to Wall Street while communities get hollowed out. We should get money out of politics and ban congressional stock trading to remove any conflicts with acting in the public interest.

Abundance is possible. But not if we ignore the power structures that have built scarcity into our economy by design. This is a call for economic democracy. For freedom from monopoly, manipulation, and market capture. People don’t want handouts. They want a fair shot to build, create, and prosper. They want to own the fruits of their labor in a system that rewards their contributions. The main thing standing in our way is a system shaped by those that profit from holding us back. By confronting corporate power, we can build a future of shared abundance.

Jen Howard is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Stigler Center for spring/summer 2025. Before joining the Stigler Center, Howard served as the Department of Transportation's first-ever Chief Competition Officer, where she advanced Secretary Pete Buttigieg's competition and passenger rights initiatives.