A large publicly owned corporation, whose stockholders are other publicly-owned corporations and funds, whose stockholders...(you catch my drift?); and run by interchangeable paid professional managers with no history in the industry or personal commitmment to the firm, is as much a collectivist organization as any state-owned industry was in the Soviet Union. It is capitalism's answer to the family- or individually- owned business: a single minded money-making machine without the pride or sentiment that goes with the individual enterprise. It is as far as you can get from the lemonade-stand-on-the-corner mom-and-pop shop that defenders of capitalism point out as the archetype of the free market.

However, due to sheer size and economic/political power, these monoliths exhibit a huge amount of inertia and it is difficult for market forces to bring them down, or for more efficient competitors to develop the initial clout to challenge them. They have developed all sorts of techniqes to "game the system", including abandoning markets they are failing at and simply taking over other ones (like moving from building cars to financing car loans). These are vertical monopolies, which dominate every related aspect of a business, as opposed to the old traditional horizontal monopoy which dominates every market in a business. And when profitability drops below acceptable levels, they liquidate assets and move into an unrelated area where they perceive an opportunity.

Sure, the market eventually catches up with these guys (the US car industry is a prime example), but when they go down they drag down whole communities, investors, their suppliers, and millions of workers and their families with them. No, I don't know the answer to this, I haven't any solutions, but I do know these organizations are not human and they care nothing for human lives and freedom and prosperity. These are the collectives we should be worried about, because they are masquerading as free enterprise.