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by aylmao 3402 days ago
I too thought "free market" was all about competition. Explain pls?
1 comments

I think the overall thrust, which I don't necessarily disagree with, is that there are many ways to enact barriers to enter a even in a perfectly free capitalist market. Think CPU fabrication. You'd need literally billions in tooling and R&D to start manufacturing modern CPUs. That's a formidable barrier to entry. Anybody could in theory but very few can in practice. Which means Intel and a few others make a tidy profit on their market position. And that's economically pretty functional, since the risks of investing billions of dollars over decades are not currently poised to offer significant enough returns to entice investment.

There are a lot of other, less savory, ways to manipulate free markets to stifle competition, however. Your friendly neighborhood cable company, for one example.