Monopoly in a free market | Is it possible?

Government regulation actually causes monopolies because more regulation makes it harder for smaller companies to begin and compete with the bigger companies.

what happens if the particular market has high start up costs? Eg. utilities infrastructure. Then if a company does start dumping and gets rid of its competitors, will new businesses not start up since it costs too much leading to a natural monopoly?

Government should prevent monopolies, but also not create one

I have to disagree. Yes if a monopoly is bad enough change is still possible, but with huge cost, so a regulated monopoly can be cheaper.
The State itself is also a monopoly somehow yes there is still possible to rebel but with cost.

This video ignores the most basic way monopolies begin which is simply by being able to produce more of a given good. The more of a given good you can produce the cheaper it can be produced per unit. This enables the company to sell it cheaper, eliminating competition who simply cannot lower prices that much. This is how monopolies are commonplace in free market economies. He didn't say anything about mergers and how relevant they are to the substitutes in the market. If one company owns the the substitutes, are the really substitutes? He mentioned at the beginning of the video that companies could engage in predatory pricing, but seems to forget later. He mentions something about smaller companies buying the stock of the bigger one. Maybe he knows more about stocks than me, but I would think if smaller companies started buying Apple stock, Apple would be very happy about it, and become bigger. Also, he seems to think airplanes are a substitute for roads, which is weird and wrong. And wells are a substitute for water bottles, was that what he said? Also weird. He mentioned the brilliant economist Murray Rothbard. My comment can only be so long but just look him up folks, because he's not so brilliant.

The extreme inequality we have now favors extreme monopolies, the wealthy billionaires absorb all the money from the lower classes, store it away in fiscal heavens and so the money is not reinvested. Middle class people on the other hand reinvest almost all the money and so the businnes cycle continues. So, unless you tax away the extreme inequality we have now, you wont have prosperity, this is just 1+1. You have either a middle class economy or you have a billionaires and poor people economy, you cant have both. The "free market"-mantra is just pure ideology, not factual in the real world

Actually, when you say that monopoly can « theorically » arise in the free market, this is false. Your error is to only comparing the market of alcohol, but why so ? Customers also use their money for a lot of others things. When a customer buy something, it means that he also choose to NOT buy something. If I buy a book, this money isn't earned by the alcohol industry. So actually, in the free market, every commerce is competing with each other. Don't believe me ? See Amazon, for example. In the beginning, they were only selling Books, now they sell everything (to minimise the competition).

This video is nonsense. The only question is whether it is naïve or dishonest.

this is an awesome video

Tragically socialists don't bother to check their ideology with reality, otherwise they'd not be socialists.

I agree with everything you said, except that digging wells or buying water bottles are no substitutes for tap water. wells are no garantee for health and water bottles use plastic, harmfull for the envirnoment. I think you are too much biased on the austrian economics view. there are some situations the market won't work, the water supply being one of them.

I read the Dow's story, it is interesting tactic. I am not sure if it will always work. If company A can sell above profit margin and competitor can't follow if they are smaller. Also, why would anyone buy from B, C, D if A has the lowest price.
Choosing train or plane is not always an option if your city, or the destination, does not have that kind of connection. And monopolised alternatives will also be expensive. Bottled water is much more expensive than tap. And you can't bathe in bottled water. And not everyone can dig a well. Building double infrastructure does not make any sense, as you also mentioned, and the price rise that to be an option is probably extreme.
The cartel will send goons rather than go bankrupt because of a small factory. If police intervene they can pay them. Or they can buy them, or lower the prices as in first example.

my teacher was teaching us that businessesman can create monopoly and was using that argument that u debunked at the start of the video. ty for video

"This kind of monopoly is not harmful"

Google CEO: Laughs in 1984

The most important issue here is whether we should keep referring to pitiful collections of axioms, assumptions, unreasoned conclusions, lies and verbalism - all with no data or a real-life example - like the one above as "economics" or as "a modern approach to parody that can revive the genre". In any case, following the arguments of a free-market economist for a couple of minutes can really challenge one's rejection of fortunetelling or astrology. As for the good people convinced by this irrational monologue of the improbability monopolies and trusts ever to exist in a free-market economy, I propose you make a quick search for luxotica, the number of car manufacturers over time, the companies that control the food market, and so on. Νeoliberal policies and market monopolization are inherent to one another. In fact, any evidence relative to the matter you'll ever find will only back this statement. The video narration of the "theory", here, is pathetic: Right after the narrator tries to convince us that monopolies don't exist in a free-market, he argues that ok even they do, it's a good thing! LOL. Anyway, enough said, I'm off to my next startup that will challenge the monopoly of amazon. ops, sorry, no monopolies exist, damned

I -
I am very late seeming this came out years ago but WHAT!
You can give scenarios saying in such and such scenarios the free market will contradictory to belief stop monopolies.
Yet monopolies did exist in free markets thus you must be hiding something because surely when there was a free market in America before the anti trust laws there shouldn't have been monopolies but damn there was because they grew slowly bought out the competition until eventually there was no one major left and the companies could then stop other companies from competing by buying out more companies or price dumping in areas with new competition with higher prices elsewhere.
Please do not skip around case studies next time please and please don't pretend the scenarios you give are the only possible way for someone to try form a monopoly in a free market

cartelization destroys the companies in the cartel and theri competitor becomes a short term monopoly :)
and then other companies enter the market and we end up where we started but with increased innovation

Tell it to Parler

Great insight

Now i understand why google and apple are not monopolies.. Because although they have the boggets market share, no one prefer the competition, because they are sumply better, and even when they are much more expensive, people mostly don't want to use the other ones

monopolies do happen in free markets.
team fortress 2 is its own subgenre and does not have a single competitor anywhere in the gaming industry.

What an elegant proof that monopolies are not possible in a "free market!!!!!" NOW, can you give an example of an actually existing FREE MARKET?!?!?!?

i have brainrot now thank you

What a great explanation of dealing with monopolies in free market. Of course, the problem is that free market is still not free.

Geez, this guy talks slow. I've got it on 2x and I'm falling asleep.

This is oversimplified and forgets about supply chain, violence, and the fact that starting capital is not as easy to get as you expect. If you have diversified assets, you can completely break the system, and literally kill your competition.

But what about land? It's inherently monopolistic competition and effects every other market.

The biggest and worst monopoly imaginable is the government, as we saw in the 20th century and it's disastrous wars funded by government monopoly on land, power, buisness , currency and violence. Meanwhile, the closest we had to a free market is the US of old days, and the only monopoly that happened there was Rockefeller, who, indirectly saved the whales, and made oil and oil products cheap and available to everyone while before they where completely out of reach for most... The choice is clear, government monopoly is better! (Lol people, the majority of people are absolutely retarded it seems)

Free the markets! 🙌🏻

It’s striking to me that people still believe low price & higher quality are the only factors when it comes to customers making the purchasing decision. Marketing has a HUGE influence over consumers. A product can be overly priced and of poor quality but can still be solid hand over fist due to marketing. And startup competitors often cannot match the marketing spend of the big boys. Additionally monopolies can erect barriers to entry which prevent potential competitors bringing low priced or higher quality products to market. In an unregulated market a website like Amazon could also be an ISP and put tolls in front of all competitor e-commerce website. No matter how much better the competitor is, the tolls they would have to pay or the subsequent slow connect that would result from not paying the toll would reduce or eliminate any hope they had at taking on Amazon.

I love markets, but it’s important to remember that they do indeed tend toward monopoly (even if that producer doesn’t have the best quality or prices), and despite how this video would like to frame it, once a monopoly is establish it can do loads of stuff to eliminate competitive threats. Given all of this we need to pair our markets with regulations to ensure competition.

Bad monopolies can exist; HOWEVER, it is either temporary or will create a better product.

Nice straw man at the beginning

Monopoly is possible in cronyism
Or even in demand side economics
And in Socialism it's obviously the monopoly!

Free market is sole fighter of monopoly

You bet your a$$ that its possible. Its pretty much how the US economy works.

Same

There is no way to separate the economy from politics. The capitalists will always find a way to influence the political system. In the US, for example, the vast majority of democrats and repiblicans are funded by corporations (which also eliminates "competition" in the political arena - they can't be beaten by any politician who is not heavily funded by them), and accordingly promote laws in favor of the big corporations.
There is no such thing as a "free market" - it destroys itself.

What about internet in the UA? A couple of companies devided the whole country and offer bad service for high price.

There are three factors at play that cannot be ignored. Startup costs, which tend to increase as industries modernize, making entry into a market more difficult for new competitors, thus un-freeing the market. Network effects, which are common in natural monopolies and big tech, where the more monopolized the industry is the less demand there is for competition. Scale, where larger firms can more efficiently produce products than any new competitor, permanently pricing out their competition. These are three inescapably real features of our world that prevent the free market from existing.

👍👍👍👍

I know this may be somewhat off topic but how do we tackle the problem of someones worth on the market being so little that they themselves can’t afford proper housing, food, and other necessities?

This is a simplification and misinformation.

Just look historically on the monopolies that exist today and see in which ways they exploited the free market.

Just a socialist sitting here laughing at your pie in the sky rhetoric. You think companies give a fuck about you. How cute.

What about the banking monopoly?

In nearly every criticism I encounter of capitalism, the counterargument is always "competition".

Very sigma video, ty. simga fluf out

If you have usury then the usurers end up owning all the stuff and anything they immorally want from people and small children as payment for the debts. That is monopoly.

Sounds good on paper but the world is much more complicated & doesn't work that way. No easy solutions in the real world, only messy ones

So as long as we don’t stop them making the thing poisonous
We don’t stop them from endangering their employees
We don’t stop them from doing what the want to the environment
They work fine?
And unlike how every company becomes a monopoly in reality they say it was the government who did it….
Sounds like the ideology of a conspiracy nut…