By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

America was built on freedom and capitalism. Those two things go together whether people like it or not. You don’t really have personal freedom if you don’t have the freedom to choose your work or decide how to spend what you earn.

No, America’s never been perfect. But let’s not kid ourselves either. We’ve been exceptional. Our system inspired people around the world to throw off kings, dictators, and regimes that treated them like property. And the fact that we struggle to keep people out says more than any speech ever could. Bad systems build walls to keep people in. Ours has people trying to get in.

But somewhere along the line, something started to shift. Like that old story about the frog in the pot, the temperature didn’t spike all at once. It crept up. And now what we call a “free market” is starting to look a lot more like crony capitalism — a system where the right connections matter more than hard work, and where a handful of players get to rig the game.

That’s not just bad economics. It’s a threat to free speech, and it’s a threat to the whole idea of a functioning republic.

This isn’t new territory, either. Republicans used to understand that a free market meant opportunity for everybody, not just a few monopolists sitting at the top. That’s why they pushed the Sherman Antitrust Act back in 1890. And it didn’t stop there. Forty-two years ago, the Bell System, which controlled most of the country’s phone service, got broken up. Not in some ancient history book. Forty-two years. That’s recent enough that plenty of people still remember it.

And here’s the thing … Bell didn’t listen to your conversations and flag them. It didn’t track what you said and decide whether you should still be allowed to use the phone. It didn’t shut people out of the system over their political views. Big Tech does.

Today, a handful of companies control massive portions of how we communicate and do business. People get deplatformed for questioning official narratives. Stories like the Biden laptop situation were suppressed. Platforms like Parler got kneecapped before they could even get traction. It’s a small club. And most people aren’t in it.

Now, even a state panel in California has looked at this and said plainly: this isn’t a conspiracy theory. There are real concerns about collusion and monopolistic behavior.

Assembly Bill 1776 is one attempt to deal with that. The bill builds on California’s existing antitrust laws under the Cartwright Act, aiming to promote free and fair competition and crack down on conduct that restrains trade or entrenches monopolies.

Does it fix everything? No. It doesn’t break up Big Tech overnight. It doesn’t suddenly level the playing field. But it’s at least a step toward holding powerful companies accountable in a system that’s starting to tilt too far in one direction.

What happens next? Who knows. Politics is messy. Regular people don’t always get heard. But if California actually wants an economy where the next generation of small businesses has a shot, it can’t keep pretending the system isn’t being gamed.

At some point, you either believe in competition … or you don’t.