the right to market their products to buyers who have almost no alternative.

Buffet quotes “Competition may prove hazardous to human wealth” and likes to say the nature of capitalism is that if you’ve got a good business, someone is always wanting to take it away from you and improve on it.”

The ideal business was one that had “high pricing power, a monopoly.” The message is clear: If you invest in a competitive business, you are doing it wrong. Value-investing hordes are searching for stocks with “wide moats” that discourage pesky competitors.

However, businesses without competition (i.e., monopolies) can lose something important in the long run: an incentive to get better. They stop innovating, without any risk in the near term. This is not healthy for anyone.

Culture thrives when open competition encourages producers to deliver the best goods at the lowest prices. It has a cost: some ideas fail. But that is essential, too. It signals better uses should be found for those workers and capital.

The more general argument here is that leading “capitalists” are not really capitalist, particularly when they use political power to stamp out competition. Fake capitalism promotes wealth concentration that leads to economic stagnation, political instability and…

If I was Lenin I’d probably argue, If you are going to bring about socialism, just pretend that nothing is wrong and stay on the current course.

The ultimate aim of these companies is to bankrupt or threaten anybody who tries to operate a real company, one in which entrepreneurs compete by reducing costs by applying a method to materials to make it more valuable than the sum of its parts

Instead, they compete only on access to capital, which they use to manufacture goods worth less than the sum of their parts. You can compare the outcome of this to “Gresham’s law,” which describes how, when counterfeit money is in circulation, “bad money drive out good.”

I mean, if you get a fake coin, you’re trying to spend it as fast as you can because if it gets dtetcted while you have it you will lose. The person you trick into getting the coin always wants to spend it as soon as possible, until the bogus ones are the only coins circulating

This creates and economy where bad businesses drive out good: where running a business that figures out how to make better products at a better price has to compete with businesses that will always underprice a profitable rival to drive them out of the market

Then jack up prices to provide profits so that investors can use to do the trick again and again. Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences.

So if you can counterfeit something for cheap, the counterfeit will eventually take over the entire market and drive out the real commodity. MP3s and then streaming are an early example of this

Aggressive pricing schemes waste resources entirely on money-losing enterprises, and gradually these enterprises become self-dealing Soviet-style generators run by actors playing captains of Industry