9. Monopoly and Competition

02/11/2010 Murray N. Rothbard

The words monopoly and competition have been changed. Competition meant rivalry or competing, either active or potential. Businesses do not like this. Monopoly meant a grant of privilege by the government. It now means a falling demand curve. Government creates crazy regulations and the market works to get around them. Cheaper consumer products are better. It’s difficult to sustain quotas - cartel agreements; everybody cheats. Cartels break up in the free market unless government intervenes and props them up.

Part 9 of 14. Presented in 1986 at New York Polytechnic University.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.