Myth #1: Free markets are competitive
It seems that at each stage of industrial progress a new monopoly has appeared to take hold of that era’s critical technologies ‒ be it railroads, oil, the internet or big data. Seven of the eight most valuable companies in the world today are tech companies: Apple (worth $961 billion), Microsoft ($946 billion), Amazon ($916 billion), Alphabet (the holding company for Google, worth $863 billion), Facebook ($512 billion), Alibaba (the ‘Chinese Amazon’, $480 billion) and Tencent (the ‘Chinese Facebook’, $472 billion).1 For a sense of scale, oil company ExxonMobil is worth ‘only’ $343 billion. Facebook and Google together control 84 per cent of online advertising,2 with advertising accounting for 97 per cent and 88 per cent of their total revenues respectively.3 And if we were still in any doubt as to the economic might of these companies, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly used to end Facebook staff meetings by shouting: ‘Domination!’4
When it comes to Big Tech, the list of transgressions is frightful: the proliferation of harmful and hateful content online; the spread of fake news and research; the commercialization of our personal information; violations of privacy; the exclusion of competitors from their platforms; the subversion of democracy; tax avoidance; poor treatment of workers; the creation of addictive products; the programmed prejudices of AI; the rising supremacy of robots over humans. These companies got to their positions of power through free market competition, having to prove that they had the best, most appealing products. But what about now? What keeps them at the top?
To a lay observer it is perplexing that these market-ruling companies are not besieged by the antitrust authorities ‒ and indeed these companies probably feel that they are. But their deals consistently get the regulatory green light ‒ from Facebook snapping up WhatsApp to Microsoft taking over Skype ‒ and when their dominance is acknowledged and abuses are identified, the fines are footnotes to the balance sheet, even when they run up into the billions, and they generally come too late to make a difference to the market. The damage, by the end of whichever authority’s lengthy investigation, has already been done.
Regulators have had trouble seeing past the prices ‒ which are low or free ‒ and the innovation and huge value brought to customers. But the costs are still there, they are just hidden upstream, in the prices paid by advertisers and passed on to customers in separate markets, or in the shadow prices paid by consumers in the form of their data, their time and their privacy. If the lay observer could see the problems, why couldn’t the competition experts?
The first myth of the free market centres on a word: competition. The word ‘competition’ conjures up a world of fairness and excellence: where the playing field is level, the odds are even, and the winner deserves their prize. In markets, we are told, for there to be true competition, the players must be left to their own devices, free from oppressive and distorting regulation, free to compete and to be the best.
Our model of competition is simple: the presence of rivalry forces each of us to up our game. If everyone does this – strives to be the best that they can be – then collectively we will be the best that we can be, as a society. A competitive economy, it is assumed, will produce the greatest possible output at the least possible cost, and there will be no way to improve on the resulting allocation of resources, as long as the competition was fair and free.
Consumers, in particular, are singled out as beneficiaries of competition. In a competitive market, consumers get ‘consumer welfare’, in a very limited economic sense, by paying less for something than they were willing to. It is the boost you get when you go for an ice cream on a hot day, ready to part with £2 for a cone, only to find out that there are two rival ice cream stands and they are both charging just £1.50. That is £0.50 of consumer surplus hitting your utility-o-meter. You are welcome.
Consumer welfare goes up and down in reverse proportion to price – hence the theoretical focus of competition law on maintaining low prices for the benefit of consumers. If a company is able to obtain market power then it can raise its price above the competitive level – shifting that welfare from the consumer to its own pocket in the form of extra profits. And increasing the price also means that fewer people will buy the product, reducing output. Market power therefore benefits the company able to wield it, at the expense of the wider economy.
Unfortunately, perfect competition does not exist in reality. When there are quirks in the market that allow sellers to gain power over buyers, then it is as if these vendors have gained extra profits by exploiting a loophole (what economists would call a ‘market failure’). Other market failures cause loopholes too: if a company has more information than customers then it can get away with charging more, or charging different amounts to different groups of people.
Another category of market failure is ‘negative externalities’ or ‘spillovers’. These are costs that the company is able to externalize and on which the market does not put a price ‒ I cannot charge drivers for polluting the air near my children’s school, for example. So if there is no tax or law that otherwise discourages or prevents them, these spillovers present a profitable loophole for companies to exploit because they can make society pay for what would otherwise be a cost to their bottom line. The power to inflict these harms is downplayed by our models of competition. But these harms to society and the environment, which are not priced by the market system, accrue within the economic system anyway, acting as a lead weight dragging society and the economy down.
Competition is not just an economic principle, it is a cultural principle too, and we internalize it from an early age. It is what we teach our kids. An old episode from 1961 of the cartoon classic Looney Tunes, called Daffy’s Inn Trouble, exemplifies the myth of competition. Daffy Duck is working as a cleaner at Porky Pig’s saloon on the western frontier. Daffy is annoyed when Porky tells him he has a present to give him and it is nothing more than a new broom. Daffy quits in disgust and opens a rival tavern across the road. Competition ensues. Daffy offers free food and TV to customers to lure them away from Porky. Porky puts on a vaudeville show with live can-can girls, which prompts Daffy to try to put on his own cabaret show himself, in drag. Already customers have benefited – competition has spurred the expansion of services.
Daffy is frustrated by his inability to attract business, so he thinks, ‘If you cannot beat them, why not join them?’ He offers to go into partnership with Porky, first extending a friendly business proposition and then, when that does not work, threatening Porky with a pistol.
Then Daffy thinks again, ‘If you cannot join them, why not destroy them?’ He attempts to commit an act of corporate terrorism, entering Porky’s restaurant in disguise, planting a bomb and then detonating it to flatten Porky’s establishment. Unfortunately for Daffy, the explosion reveals a gushing oil well sitting under Porky’s building. Porky develops the oil field and, now very well funded, puts a swanky hotel right next door, monopolizing the market. He rehires Daffy as a janitor, and the message is clear: cheating will not pay off, only those who deserve to win will be victorious.
What the episode also demonstrates, though, is that not all competition is good for consumers. If Porky had colluded with Daffy, or if Daffy’s scheme to blow up Porky’s inn had been successful, consumers, and indeed society, would have lost out. It was only luck and Porky’s good character that preserved the benefits of competition, but it was ruthless competition that drove Daffy to his scheming. Daffy could just as easily have gotten away with it.
Competition that produces spillovers ‒ allowing companies to pollute, to destabilize democracy, to endanger our health and to accumulate power for themselves ‒ is not the good kind of competition we want to encourage. When we praise competition, there are various avenues we do not explore. How are the low prices for consumers achieved, and what else gets squeezed to lower them? If shareholders must be assured a return in competitive industries, who or what must accept less? Once the winner has won the race to dominance – then what? Different companies may have different levels of ability or willingness or cunning to inflict harm, but the competitor who finds a way to leverage externalities to earn additional profits can use this as a path to growth and therefore market power. Negative spillovers and market power, and the competition that births them both, are intimately connected.
This is a critical oversight lying unexamined in our economic theory of capitalism, shielded from view by the thicket of free market myths we will gradually untangle in this book. Beyond the impact of market power on prices, we have ignored most of the sources and kinds of power that matter. In particular, we have overlooked the power to impose negative spillovers on an unsuspecting society.
Economists acknowledge that spillovers exist. But the scale of them is vastly underappreciated, and they are treated as an afterthought. One UN-backed report in 2013 estimated that the global cost to the world economy of negative spillovers from sectors such as agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, oil and gas exploration and utilities is around $7.3 trillion a year (or around 10 per cent of global GDP) in damage to the environment, health and other vital systems on which humankind relies.5 That is not a side issue, it is fast becoming the main issue of our times.
What does it mean to call markets ‘free’? On the one hand it could just mean that they are unregulated – free from government intervention. But we usually also take it to mean that they are competitive – that no one party controls them, that many companies hawk and trade in a diverse and bustling market. And yet, all around us, rivals are merging, or failing, with industries playing host to fewer and fewer competitors. The evidence shows that competition is giving way to monopoly across the economy.
Concentration is everywhere. Three firms, American Express, MasterCard and Visa, control over 90 per cent of the US credit card market, and four firms account for two-thirds of the UK market.6 Three companies control 70 per cent of the world’s pesticide market, 80 per cent of the US corn-seed market, and overall just six companies control the entirety of global agribusiness.7 Ninety per cent of the planted acreage of cotton in the US uses the seeds of one company – Monsanto (recently merged with rival Bayer).8 Two companies – Boeing and Airbus – have a worldwide duopoly in civil aviation. Two corporations control 90 per cent of the beer that Americans drink, and one of those companies, Anheuser-Busch InBev, sells one in five beers drunk on the planet.9 Five banks control about half of the banking assets in America.10 In the UK, the 100 biggest firms now account for nearly a quarter of total revenue, up 25 per cent since 2004.11 Of the ten most important consumer markets in the UK, accounting for 40 per cent of consumer spending, eight are classed as ‘concentrated’, including groceries, broadband, mobile telephony, landline-only phone contracts, electricity, gas, personal current accounts, and credit cards.12 And on and on.
This is not an isolated phenomenon, restricted to a few discrete markets. One study finds that 75 per cent of industries in the US have experienced a reduction in the number of competitors and a corresponding increase in levels of industry concentration in the last two decades.13 There is a similar trend across Europe, with 80 per cent of industries showing an increase in concentration.14
And the evidence is finally emerging that concentration leads to exactly the consequences we feared it might. Despite competition authorities blessing almost all industry tie-ups, a 2016 study by the US Federal Reserve showed that most mergers actually lead to price mark-ups, with little evidence of greater efficiency.15 A retrospective review of dozens of mergers found that post-merger prices rose in the vast majority of cases.16 The free market competition served up by competition enforcers is not even delivering low prices, let alone the other supposed benefits of competition.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, corporate profits are at an all-time high, coming at the expense of both wages and corporate investment.17 Studies indicate that these increased profits have come off the back of price increases, indicative of market power. Firms now charge a mark-up of 61 per cent over cost, as compared to 21 per cent in 1980. Mark-ups have risen not just in America but in Europe as well.18 As we might expect, profits have increased the most in the industries where competition has floundered, and wage growth has been the most anaemic in those same industries.19
Taken together, these economic indicators tell a strong story of the accretion and exercise of market power across the economy. The whole system is becoming more concentrated, changing the fundamental balance of power between the corporate sector, the state and society. Free market competition seems to really mean freedom for monopolists.
The companies occupying the remaining slots in these depopulated markets do well for themselves, but the economy suffers. High concentration leads to lower productivity, lower wages for workers, and higher prices. It also inhibits business dynamism, meaning fewer brave souls take the leap to start up a business in the first place.
We have stopped being able to perceive this rise in corporate power, even though it is all around us. Until very recently hardly anyone seemed to notice the growing trend of concentration, despite the recognition that our economies are languishing. It is an economic reality to which we have slowly become acclimatized: a hyper-concentrated industrial landscape dominated by big companies, and a free rein to capital deployed through corporations. It is as if the whole world is struggling to breathe but we have failed to realize that companies are taking up all the oxygen. In fact, this is more than metaphoric. Companies fell forests, depleting our life-giving resources, whilst exhaling greenhouse gases and other pollutants through their production processes, which we breathe in and which our atmosphere absorbs like second-hand smoke.
Free markets are supposed to bring us growth and technological advancement, so if we could believe the myth that our markets were competitive then the costs might be worth it. But actually the very opposite is true: free markets seem to inevitably turn into concentrated ones, ostensibly with the regulatory blessing of antitrust authorities. And with that market concentration comes unaccountable power. So, Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, can use its prodigious scale to deliver cheap groceries but it can also make or break an entire local economy. BP can siphon and supply oil from and to any point on the Earth’s surface, but it can also obliterate an ecosystem when it loses control of one of its wells. The bigger companies get, the greater the potential rewards but also the bigger the public exposure to their mistakes and misdeeds. If big companies can do no wrong ‒ and there is, in any case, no one to hold them accountable if they do ‒ who is to guard the grain stores of public value from being ransacked?
The rise in corporate power is not self-contained in the corporate world, it spills over into personal wealth. Far from the myth of competitive markets dispersing power, we have a capitalist system that concentrates power in the name of competition.
Just as corporate power is growing, so too are the wealth and power of the richest 1 per cent. The numbers beggar belief. Since 1980, the top 1 per cent captured 27 per cent of new income globally, whilst the bottom 50 per cent laid claim to only 12 per cent.20 In 2018, just twenty-six people owned the same amount of wealth as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, down from forty-three people the year before.21 The funnelling of corporate profits towards shareholders makes this trend worse. The proportion of GDP that is extracted by shareholders amounts to a transfer of $2 trillion of annual income going to investors, at the expense of consumers, workers and the planet.22
It turns out that the richest people get a substantial portion of their wealth through shareholdings in companies. America’s top 0.1 per cent of wealthy households hold around a third of their wealth in equities.23 And 77 per cent of capital income – dividends, interest and capital gains – is concentrated in the top 10 per cent of people.24 The middle classes invest most of their wealth in their homes, and this wealth tends to be offset or overwhelmed by mortgage debt. The rich hold only around 8 per cent of their wealth through land or property whilst investing 26 per cent of their savings in stocks.25 The wealthy derive a significant proportion of their wealth from companies designed and set up to serve the interests of shareholders and, as we shall see, these companies are predominantly owned by the wealthy.
Shareholder value therefore promotes the interests of the wealthiest 10 per cent, at the expense of the rest. The picture looks even starker if you zoom out and follow the money, as it flows to elite shareholders off the back of the gruelling work carried out by impoverished people located elsewhere in the world. Although many workers around the world do own shares, shareholder value bears down in the harshest terms on vast swathes of society ‒ and workers’ holdings are not great enough to compensate, nor could they ever really be.
We also know that market power wielded against consumers in product markets makes distributional issues worse. The price of essential goods includes an uplift to the monopolist and a kickback to the shareholder, with a ripple effect all the way down the affordability ladder. Market power hits poorer people hardest, with monopoly rents transferred to shareholders, who tend already to be rich.26 One estimate finds that for each dollar of monopoly profits, a total of $0.37 is transferred from the 90 per cent poorest to the 10 per cent richest.27 The mass of people are harmed by monopoly, and only a few benefit.
The possible causes of inequality are, of course, multiple and complex: globalization and automation driving down workers’ wages, technology delivering unprecedented wealth to a few elite individuals, lower levels of union activity reducing workers’ bargaining power. But the principle that companies should maximize profits for shareholders only, known as ‘shareholder value’, and the reality of growing market power, have also played their part.
Money transferred to shareholders is not recirculated into the economy: much of it disappears out of the system. It is estimated that $7.6 trillion of wealth is legally hidden in tax havens across the world.28 The economy is run for shareholders but they are not reinvesting in the real economy, they are extracting value from the stock market. This leaves a vacuum that companies must continually fill ‒ with cost savings from lowering the cost of production or job cuts, or cost-shifting externalities, or price increases achieved through market power.29
We can look at the ten richest people in the world, according to the 2018 Forbes rich list, and find that each one of them derived their wealth from corporate activities. The richest two people in the world, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, own companies that need no introduction; number 3 is Warren Buffett whose Berkshire Hathaway invests in and owns many other companies; number 4 is Bernard Arnault, who owns luxury brands like Louis Vuitton; Carlos Slim is number 5 and a major investor in Mexican telecoms; Amancio Ortega is the sixth richest person and the world’s richest retailer, with interests in brands like Zara, one of the companies whose clothes were produced at Rana Plaza; Larry Ellison, who co-founded the software firm Oracle in the 1970s, is number 7; number 8 is Mark Zuckerberg; number 9 is Michael Bloomberg; and number 10 is Larry Page, the co-founder of Google. Shareholder value and free market competition has certainly worked well for them and for the other 2,153 billionaires on the list, who between them were worth a total of $8.7 trillion, much of that wealth coming from corporate interests. What we see is that wealth does not only come from inheritance, land ownership, hard work and good luck: corporations are designed to solidify wealth and power, and the rich have taken advantage of that. And the rising inequality that results should really be no surprise when 157 of the top 200 economic entities in the world are corporations, not countries.30
With markets growing ever more concentrated, and companies owned by the wealthy few, the idea that free market competition results in prosperity and freedom for the many begins to take on an absurd aspect. In fact, the vast majority of the value of publicly listed companies comes from their market power.31 Market dominance signals a good investment, as does the ability to create unregulated spillovers. And it makes sense: if a company has no power, either to increase its prices or reduce its costs, then it will have no excess rents to distribute, in which case why would anyone invest when there are other companies with market power offering higher returns? Looking at the FTSE 100 we should not therefore be shocked to see that British American Tobacco is still amongst the top 10 companies, ranked by market capitalization. Royal Dutch Shell is number 1.
The seemingly unavoidable tendency within capitalism is for power and money to accumulate, and the freer the market – with less government intervention and less market-distorting taxation – the more this will be so. Money breeds money, and we do not redistribute it nearly enough to compensate for that, because we are worried about dampening the incentive to make more money. We buy into the contrary myth that markets are competitive: money will spread out through the economy, we think, to those who compete and win.
Modern economics has catalogued the ways in which companies are able to build up competitive moats to defend their monopolistic positions ‒ from exploiting first mover advantages, network effects and customer switching costs, to using information asymmetries, contractual bargaining power and intellectual property rights to entrench their dominance. Recent Nobel prizes have been won for these very observations.fn1 It is clear that, left to themselves, markets veer almost inevitably towards concentration. The mechanisms by which this is achieved are myriad, and companies ‒ chasing a return and a reprieve from competition ‒ are designed to seek them out.
Recent research by economist Thomas Piketty and his colleagues has also shown that there is indeed a natural propensity for capital to accumulate.32 Capital income from investments, such as from interest and dividends, will end up less evenly distributed than labour income from work. The exception is executive pay. The executives and managers that head up large firms and banks, technically still ‘workers’, have become untethered from the rest of society, floating in a separate, rarefied ether made of money. They are able to exercise bargaining power in company hierarchies by sitting on each other’s remuneration committees, awarding each other bonuses, share options and pay increases, and thereby earning ‘super salaries’ that are completely unrelated to their actual productivity, performance or market forces. Either way, through capital investments or their pay, the rich get richer.
The general response is that we do not need to worry about escalating wealth because economic dynamism will keep inequality at bay. Even if the rich get richer, the poor will get richer too. But in fact, as Piketty shows, the only times when inequality has actually declined in the last two hundred years are when capital itself has been destroyed (through two world wars) or when income has been aggressively redistributed via progressive taxation at rates considered unthinkable today – with top income tax rates of over 90 per cent in the UK and US around the Second World War. Capitalism itself is not an equalizer.
The impulse of competition to create wealth and power is perhaps most clear in relation to tech markets. How have the tech giants emerged from a decade of phenomenal growth and market domination more or less unscathed by antitrust inquiry? How could the antitrust community convince itself that Google, with a 90 per cent market share in search, still faces significant competition? To fight their way out of this intellectual corner, competition lawyers and economists have historically relied upon the concept of ‘contestability’. In the internet age, they insist, competition is just ‘one click away’ – even Google supposedly exists in a highly contested market, replete with potential competitors. Monopoly would have no chance to endure: there are no barriers to entry, as anyone can start a website, and the constant churn of start-ups is evidence of vigorous competition.
If you can still call this competition, though, it is a version that seems to primarily benefit the few not the many. In fact, it appears to be a bit of a sham. Contestability conjures the image of Gulliver besieged by the Lilliputians, or the Earth’s atmosphere battered by cosmic rays. It relies on the idea that even big companies face relentless competition from the small guys trying to chip away at their market power and from potential competitors waiting in the wings. But the reality is closer to the nineteenth-century Wimbledon tennis tournaments where the defending champion did not have to play any of the heats and therefore faced their weary challenger in the final fresh and energized. Unsurprisingly, a few winners dominated the championships year after year.
Contestability assumes that even very large firms in concentrated markets would be forced to behave competitively and price as if they are, in fact, facing competition, even if they are not. It neatly encapsulates the unshakeable faith in free markets and the myth that free markets are competitive even when they do not seem to be. This ‘as if’ was articulated by economist Milton Friedman, a doyen of the neoliberal Chicago School of economics, expressing his admiration for the monopolistic economy: ‘I have become increasingly impressed,’ he said, ‘with how wide is the range of problems and industries for which it is appropriate to treat the economy as if it were competitive’.33 As if, Friedman, as if.
This hypothetical competition has proven to be illusory in practice too. High profits are not enticing start-ups into industry, in part because the incumbents use their excess profits to create a walled garden: they lobby for precisely the kind of regulation that would keep smaller entrants out.34 It turns out that monopolists can and have lasted decades, and that it is very wishful thinking to assume that a usurper is just around the corner and that we can continue to allow the incumbent to bed down in the meantime. There is little empirical evidence of potential entry restraining monopolists’ activities, even in those markets where entry is supposed to be more likely.35 Let’s take the supposed low barriers to entry of digital markets ‒ yes, anyone with a computer, a server and access to the internet is free to clone the entire Facebook site, including all its features (if we were to ignore intellectual property laws). But that does not mean they could convince a single user to use the new service, because the value in Facebook comes from the users, and specifically from the ‘network effects’ ‒ the value for each individual user of the network of other users already using the service.
Could Facebook really be ‘blindsided by a start-up in a garage or an unexpected technological shift’ as The Economist once suggested?36 Not if, along with the other tech giants, it continues to police the ‘kill zone’, hoovering up or squashing any potential competitors, ensuring that venture capitalists will not invest in technologies into which they know these companies are moving, effectively eliminating the possibility of potential competition. As it stands, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon occupy pole positions across a number of technologies, including search, mail, messaging, maps, cloud computing, social networking, AI, autonomous vehicles and digital advertising.
It remains unclear that rivalry between just a few enormous firms replicates the consumer benefits of classic competition between many small players.37
And so the word competition has become a code word for domination, on the assumption that as long as prices are low – which they are assumed already to be ‒ then the accumulation of power does not matter. It would be a truly wondrous system, if it were real.
The mythology of free markets begins with the word ‘competition’. Competition means the rivalry of many small companies, or it means the defence of a dominant market position by a monopolist. Competition means the race to the top, or it can mean the never-ending victory lap. Competition means competing fairly, but there is much foul play that the rules of the game ignore. As antitrust reformer Matt Stoller explains, alongside our submission to free markets, we have somehow lost the words to describe and identify corporate power: ‘Words like “ liberty ” and “ markets ” and “ competition ” and “ monopoly ” and “ citizen ”,’ he says, ‘have been perverted, taken by technocrats who hide the levers of power from most of us.’38 We call a market competitive when it is actually monopolistic and rife with externalities and inefficiencies: it is free only in the sense that it is a free-for-all.
Our idea of competition is tied up with morality, in particular the notion that in a free market people get what they deserve, like industrious Porky versus dastardly Daffy. But success on the market has as much to do with luck as it does with skill (like the oil well discovered under Porky’s inn), and any company experiencing commercial success does so by standing on the shoulders of many giants ‒ from its workers, its customers and the state, to prior innovations, public resources, public infrastructure and the natural environment. But instead of fulfilling their debts to society, we see corporations shifting their profits offshore to hide them from tax liability – to the tune of trillions in undeclared revenues.
Politicians of all stripes can agree that we should have more competition, whilst harbouring very different visions of how markets should work. We applaud competition, but free markets do not create a multiplicity of options and dispersed power. Instead, markets inevitably tend to consolidate, and yet we often still label the results ‘competitive’. If this is the case then it is likely that we are vastly under-reacting to corporate power, naively assuming that it soon shall pass. Rather, we must look at ramping up antitrust enforcement and challenging power itself. Business success should come with greater responsibility, not just to share the wealth through the redistributive system of taxation but also to share the accompanying power.
The objection will be that this is unfair ‒ why should we target successful companies? Won’t this hinder their performance? If we punish big companies for being successful by saddling them with more responsibility then will it not kill the market dynamism of capitalism, which brings us innovation, well-being and, well, stuff? But the truth is that monopolies and powerful companies, earning above-competitive prices by taking advantage of some market failure, can afford to do some good. And if it turns out that taking care of their broader stakeholders so hobbles a powerful company, or sends it into bankruptcy, then we should question the legitimacy of their original business model: it was likely built on the co-opting of public value and little more.
We cannot get away from the word ‘competition’, we are stuck with it. But when we come across it we can be on our guard, recognizing that people often use it in paradoxical ways, as a cover for what is really better described as the process of attempting to accumulate power ‒ whether legitimately or illegitimately, whether successfully or not. Currently, many markets are highly concentrated, as the evidence shows. If someone claims a market is competitive, they must mean something other than free from market power ‒ and certainly they cannot mean it is free from spillovers, as almost no market is. Think twice whenever you come across the word. What does it really mean? You have been warned.
Myth #1: Free markets are competitive.
Reality: Free market competition creates power. In fact, ‘competition’ has come to be synonymous with domination and corporate power.