alt Hacker News> the existence of an immense right-wing propaganda machine
The biggest trick corporate oligarchs have managed to pull off is convincing people that consolidated markets are "right-wing". Adam Smith is in the public domain, you can read it for free:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300
A core premise of the book is basically that competitive free markets are good, antitrust is important and government regulations have a tendency to favor cronies and impair competition.
The cronies, of course, don't actually like competitive free markets, so they pervert this as "government regulations including antitrust are always bad" whenever someone wants to do some trust busting. Which in turn sets up their own misconstruction as the straw man to knock down whenever they want to demonize competitive free markets in order to sustain or create regulations propping up their monopolies.
America's right-wing has never wanted competitive free markets, and has never been represented by Adam Smith, the man who said:
"the disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."
America's right-wing has always been about enriching the connected and the already powerful. Nothing more.