Nathaniel Branden Quotes

It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible.

When people speak in an economic or political context, of the dangers and evils of monopoly, what they mean is a coercive monopoly--that is; exclusive control of a given field of production which is closed to and exempt from competition, so that those controlling the field are able to set arbitrary production policies and charge arbitrary prices, independent of the market, immune from the law of supply and demand. Such a monopoly, it is important to note, entails more than the absence of competition; it entails the impossibility of competition. That is a coercive monopoly’s characteristic attribute--and is essential to any condemnation of such a monopoly. In the whole history of capitalism, no one has been able to establish a coercive monopoly by means of competition on a free market. There is only one way to forbid entry into a given field of production: by law. Every single coercive monopoly that exists or ever has existed--in the United States, in Europe or anywhere else in the world--was created and made possible only by an act of government: by special franchises, licenses, subsidies, by legislative actions which granted special privileges (not obtainable on a free market) to a man or a group of men, and forbade all others to enter that particular field. A coercive monopoly is not the result of laissez-faire; it can result only from the abrogation of laissez-faire and from the introduction of the opposite principle--the principle of statism.