I'm with GPH on the "I'm not sure what you mean. At all."
There's a lot of ways to make something cheaper.
-Finding a new way to mechanize production of a part to lower the cost? Good.
-Improving a product, increasing demand as a result, and therefore lowering the per unit production cost? Great.
-Developing a new design that produces a product of equal quality, with either less parts or less complex assembly and therefore cost? Awesome.
-Cutting corners to build a piece of crap that will break right after the warranty expires? Bad.
-Lying and false advertising to make your product look far better than it really is? Terrible.
-Employing slave labor or sweatshops? Abysmal.
Likewise, why is a company buying others out? There's plenty of reasons - both good and bad - to do this. If they're trying to buy everyone else purely to monopolize an industry, then yeah, there's huge problems with that, and anti-monopoly laws need to be enforced.
On the other hand, sometimes a company fails, but has one good product that makes them worth buying to another company. Sometimes a company forms intentionally around a product they don't have the resources to make happen, so they can sell the tech to Google (or whoever). No problem, and this is, in fact, sometimes the only feasible way to get an idea off the ground.
You really can't use blanket statements like "making stuff cheap is bad" or "buying another company is bad", because it really, really, depends on why it's being down, and what the results are.
Do I think we need better enforcement of things like anti-monopoly laws, especially in the US? Yes. It's important, however, that they only get applied when there's clear abuses of the system.
As for stopping the use of sweatshops and the like, that's a clusterfark worthy of its own discussion thread, as the certain entire industries have been corrupted by that, and fixing them would require several steps.
