<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>programmingpol</author><text>As a Republican elected official in a southeastern state, I have a front-row seat to what this article points at.&lt;p&gt;The road construction industry used to be a great opportunity for small business people to create for themselves a substantial income. These days, all the companies in our area are owned by conglomerates, backed by billion dollar financial institutions. If you were to risk a million or two or an asphalt plant, they will undercut your prices till you go bankrupt, then inflate their prices once again. The two companies in our area will bid on all of our projects, but it&amp;#x27;s clear they are in cahoots when it comes to their pricing.&lt;p&gt;By our estimates, the taxpayers are overpaying by at least 15% - 20%. In my mind, this robs others of opportunity and transfers wealth from tax-paying citizens to billion dollar companies.&lt;p&gt;No one points this out because the road builders give a lot to politicians. Go against them, and they&amp;#x27;ll spend enough to have the public label you a RINO which, in this neck of the woods, can get you booted from office.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve wished for some time that someone could create a modular asphalt plant that can be packed up on trucks and taken to wherever the job site is. I think companies like this could help regulate prices and make a lot of money.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>UN Study Warns: Growing Economic Concentration Leads to “Rentier Capitalism”</title><url>https://promarket.org/un-study-warns-growing-economic-concentration-leads-rentier-capitalism/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>cyphereal</author><text>The article is very hand-wavy about the core rent seeking argument. There is much discussion about factors such as productivity improvements concentration of market power and mergers and acquisitions.&lt;p&gt;From TFA: &amp;quot;says Blankenburg, “the data show very clearly that the means used to obtain these profits cannot be reduced to the use of productive technologies.” Other mechanisms, such as lobbying or mergers and acquisitions, the authors find, have played a significant role in enhancing the market power of dominant companies. “You can show quite clearly how surplus profits increase with mergers and acquisitions, or how changes in regulation that favor control over intellectual property rights for large corporations have a pretty-instant impact on the profit performance of those companies,&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s the sum total of the rent seeking argument. There is nothing in there demonstrating use of IP to extract rent (which, arguably isn&amp;#x27;t even rent seeking behaviour, but for the sake of argument may be granted here). My intuition is that profit extraction due to IP for the very large companies is most obvious in pharmaceuticals, but that&amp;#x27;s just my guess?&lt;p&gt;There are a few interesting points in this article, but it&amp;#x27;s weakly written.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>UN Study Warns: Growing Economic Concentration Leads to “Rentier Capitalism”</title><url>https://promarket.org/un-study-warns-growing-economic-concentration-leads-rentier-capitalism/</url></story>