New to ancap ideology, curious to know more.
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Without market restrictions, smaller competitors have a stronger chance of breaking into a market and decentralizing the industry. However, dominance by a majority party tends to be the natural order of things. Case in point: the crypto market, how Bitcoin has maintained 50%+ dominance for most of the industry's history while many competitors fight to split the other half.
Im glad you're not simply stating that monopolies could never exist with perfect competition, as even with extremely unregulated markets like crypto currency the market tends towards a pareto distribution where there are almost always a single high performer dominating the market.
With that said, if monopolies can form naturally without any assistance (by gov't, for example), how can a market naturally balance the scales in favor of competition? I say this in reference to Standard Oil, which bought off 90% of the oil business without government intervention, and then started using anti-free market pricing strategies to keep competitors from forming.
Std Oil was a monopoly, but they also drove the price of oil down 90% and kept it there for over a century. They literally saved the whales. It is very difficult to maintain a free market monopoly without aggressive price discounting.
But even then Std Oil started to break. Before it was over, they were getting their ass kicked by the oil services industry. They wouldn't offer oil services to smaller competitors who were taking over Texas. The share holders revolted, and got the government to break up their monopoly, separating off their oil services industry. Another example of how on their own, monopolies tend to become bloated and unresponsive to the market.