Competition Is Always Superior to Monopolies & Oligopolies. Here’s Why…

Why concentrated power hurts consumers and how open markets drive innovation, lower prices, better choices, and a thriving society

Feb 13, 2026

Antagonism drives self-improvement. Rivalry fuels excellence. You wouldn’t be improving yourself unless you felt the need to excel against a benchmark set by your immediate competition. A sense of scarcity and a fear of loss incentivise you to keep working hard; first to serve yourself, and then to serve others. And serving others well ends up serving you back in time. Serving oneself is the driver of all human action, and even morality. Yes, your morality serves you, if not as a cheap performance to appease a tyrannical god-demon or to virtue-signal with moralism, then as a way to gain identity, and from which to derive purpose and meaning for your involuntary existence and reluctant participation in this reality.

Monopoly bad

The state, or centralised government, removes competition in the most significant areas of social organisation: lawmaking, policing, security, dispute resolution, and charity. These are the fundamental and only roles of government. There is nothing beyond those areas that government should delve into.

Economy? A free, open market self-regulates based on forces of competition — no need for anyone to arbitrarily manipulate an open, organic market. The more the government intervenes with its money supply monopoly and monetary/fiscal policies, the more inflation, unemployment, wealth disparities, market volatility, and market manipulation we have.

Why?

The government’s lawmaking ability constitutes it a thug-for-hire for the higher-bidding lobbyist, which is why the more government regulates, the greater the wealth gap. Big corporations purchase preferential laws by which they get tax write-offs, corporate welfare, and barriers to entry for competitors, which means they buy their monopoly or oligopoly. Monopolies and oligopolies are impossible to sustain in a free market.
Market manipulation occurs due to first-access insider knowledge possessed by those in the know about what market-shifting policy will be announced, or what geopolitical action is to be taken. This is why trading is worse than a casino: in a casino setting, you at least play against randomness. In a trading setting, you play against people who know more than you do. It’s the most rigged game imaginable. If you wish to gamble, stick to the basics.

I got sidetracked again.

I remember my father’s stories about the years he wasted living in the laughable Soviet Union, a state that owned all businesses, except for the vibrant black market its citizens were engaged in, part of which was my father, who smuggled Western jeans for deprived Soviets. I remember him describing the horrid experience of going to a government-owned restaurant. Imagine entering a hospitality establishment that is owned by unmotivated government employees, people who have no incentive to serve you well, since whether you like the service or not, they will still get paid the same, and their job security is guaranteed either way. And especially knowing that all the cozy positions were reserved for communist party suckups and inner-circle bootlickers, why would you work hard to impress your supervisors who only promote based on nepotism? This is why the Soviet Union collapsed; its people stopped taking it seriously. This is how every state collapses, and unfortunately, is swiftly replaced by a different brand of government that is solely based on people’s hope for something better.

Anyway, a guest entering a Soviet Union restaurant was treated with resentment and microaggression from the staff. This was to discourage you from ever returning. The staff would keep their job and be paid the same whether the venue was packed every day or totally empty. So, naturally, they would feel bothered whenever they had to actually work. And they went out of their way to make your experience horrible so that you never came back to burden them with your presence — they didn’t appreciate you as a paying customer because socialism isn’t a real economy based on free negotiation. The government restaurant, being a monopoly, incentivised its staff to keep you unsatisfied. No wonder the Soviet Union had luxury shops and restaurants exclusively for party members, but where employees had every incentive to keep their privileged jobs. So much for socialist “equality”. There is no greater hypocrisy than socialism.

Centralised government sucks at everything it does

Every single miserable excuse for a “service” you receive from your government you could have received much cheaper and of higher quality in a free-market competition setting. Please, read this again.

The most staring-you-in-the-face proof of this fundamental law is how consistently the cost of a public school student is less than that of a private school student. I won’t cite sources; you can do this yourself without the unaccountable, sleazy practice of throwing the ball to a “credible” reference. Plus, it’s good to regain trust in your own ability to discern reality. Simply take the budget of your country’s department/ministry of education, divide it by the annual number of public-education students, and you will be flabbergasted at how much it costs your government to deliver the worst possible level of education to your kids. Then compare that to the annual fees of an elite private school. You will conclude that shitty government education costs more than better private education.

Why does shitty public schooling cost more than much better private education? Because the state doesn’t have to earn your money: it takes it by force, with your eager compliance and complicity. When someone takes what they want from you through intimidation, they don’t value or appreciate it. It doesn’t have to work for it to outcompete any competitors. The state has no competitors in its territories. Whether you choose public or private schooling, the state still gets your money, and it still gets to enforce its own arbitrary curriculum and arbitrary accreditation.

It’s easy to be wasteful with other people’s money, money you will always get whether you work hard or not.

Government employees, especially when it’s extremely difficult for them to get fired, cannot be driven. Why would they be? There is no incentive. If they’re good, they don’t get rewarded. If they’re bad, they don’t get punished. This is why monopolies always offer inferior quality and are inefficient in their production. This is why the sustainable tyrannies allow some market freedom to preserve some of the economy; otherwise, they fall. Such an example of loosening slave collars is the scam of democracy, the prison with the delusion of freedom.

Incentive is the most reliable predictor of human behaviour

Incentive and the fear of competition (and of loss of business) are the only regulators we need. The market self-regulates all the time. It does so via positive and positive feedback, or, for proactivity, market research. By the way, market research is a process that is much more science-driven than the vast majority of medical research. You can quote me on that, since I’ve actually done market research, and looking at several recent medical papers, I can attest that the mainstream (pseudo)science’s sampling, methodologies, use of statistics, assumptions, and non-sequitur conclusions are laughable by comparison. And the people who take modern academia and scientism seriously, these “peers” who review each other and approve of each other to monopolise accreditation, are somehow in charge of our health. Let that sink in.

Anyway, competition is always a good thing because it keeps you humble. If anything, competition is a deterrent to violence. Violence occurs when there is a vast power differential. Violent people are those who are either too powerful compared to their counterparts or those who have nothing left to lose. Both are created through our deluded need for a perceived “authority”, or a surrogate parent, to tell us what to do because we’re too infantile and insecure in our own ability to self-govern, and to become ourselves an effective deterrent against thugs. This is what our sick need for centralised government boils down to: insecurity, and lack of conviction and confidence in ourselves, enough so to grant more faith in sleazy, diseased, power-hungry degenerate clowns in government; the worst people imaginable, and we presume they are better at governing us than we are governing ourselves. Centralised government is the consequence of peak self-loathing.

Conclusion

We all understand that monopolies are bad. We all agree on this, which is why we naively look to the state to supposedly disband monopolies. Yet, government is a monopoly — the biggest one there is, a monopoly of the most vital public services, no less: lawmaking, security, justice, dispute resolution, charity. That’s it, that’s all the government is supposed to do.

And without competition, meaning, without the “fear” of losing someone’s patronage or friendship, let’s face it, we’d all be assholes to them. Perhaps this is why most parents treat their children badly when the children are young, but when the children are older, and the parents are elderly, the latter suddenly become nicer to the children. Why? Because now the children don’t need the parents; they have options. Now, the parents, in their old age, are the ones who need to earn their children’s acceptance.

Competition is humility. Competition is groundedness. Competition is inspiration to improve.

It is a fallacy to presume that the state disbands monopolies. Monopolies /oligopolies exist because of government, not despite it. Under free market competition, no monopoly or oligopoly can be sustainable, since there are no barriers to entry. Guess who erects barriers to entry to benefit the lobbying big corporations? The state. This is demonstrable: the more the government regulates, the more the wealth gap widens.

If only there were a way to get those services in competition…

Read my reading list below on Voluntaryism, Consentism, and Voluntary, Stateless, Decentralised, Laissez-Faire Systems of Self-Governance in the Style of Rothbardian Austro-Anarchism.

Voluntaryism, Consentism, and Voluntary, Stateless, Decentralised, Laissez-Faire Systems of Self-Governance in the Style of Rothbardian Austro-Anarchism

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?