These are macro events, so no they haven't hurt me personally in any measurable way. Macrobreweries have hurt my ability to get good, affordable, widely-distributed beer though, by influencing regulations that severely limit craft brewers' ability to brew and sell beer in China - where I've lived for the last decade - such that there is almost no domestic craft beer sold outside of the rare brewpub, and it's just as expensive as imported craft beer because of the costs associated with entering the market through all of the regulations.
However, judging something based entirely on how it overtly affects you is wholly inadequate. To avoid the inevitable Hitler reference in an online argument, I'll defer to Pol Pot instead
. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge didn't personally affect me by committing genocide against the Cambodian people, but I'm still pretty secure in judging that what they did was a bad thing.
I suspect we're gonna get shut down and moved to the debate forum pretty soon, but I'm right with you on this one. It's the same kind of argument that mobilizes blue-collar workers to vote for the politicians who want to give tax dollars to their bosses and not to them, and it's the same kind of economics that has transformed those blue-collar workers' towns from Main Street America communities with local diners and dime stores into Wal-Mart and McDonald's strip malls. But I'll be damned if extra-soft toilet paper isn't cheaper at Wal-Mart than it was at the Five and Dime.
