The need to actively defend competitiveness from erosion seems like a vulnerability in the capitalist system. Anticompetitive behavior is a natural tendency in

The need to actively defend competitiveness from erosion seems like a vulnerability in the capitalist system. Anticompetitive behavior is a natural tendency in the system; it is advantageous for everybody all the time to be doing as much of it as they can get away with, and the gov has to actively exercise energy to determine when it gets too bad and needs to be reversed. Governments are fundamentally not very good at holding a line like this, they get tired... they greatly prefer to let things just play out on their own. They prefer to have a private company managing e.g. a local utility monopoly rather than do it themselves. It always feels like there is some element that should exist-by-default in our economic system to organically oppose monopolistic behavior, without active government attention. Roughly this looks like consumer unions: the more monopolistic an organization, the more it looks like a governmental agency, and correspondingly the more power the public should have over it—putting a ceiling on the ability of private enterprises to extract value from the public.