http://m.chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127461/
This is a great essay on how to compellingly counter the “nothing to hide” argument.
Author: Rick Weber
Idea for a story
I’m reading Radford’s “The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp” and I came up with an excellent premise for a Catch-22-esque story. Troops on one side of a war hear rumors that their enemy’s POW camps are comfortable and safe. Word spreads and military leaders get wind of this. In addition to propaganda, and other measures they spread rumors to enemy troops of their lavish prison facilities. This prompts an arms race of escalating promises of prisoners’ wellbeing. In order to make rumors credible they begin actually investing in prisoner camps. Soldiers continue to face squalid conditions so rationally get caught. Total hospitality ends the war.
A Renegade History of the United States: a brief response
A while ago I finished reading (by audiobook) A Renegade History of the United States. The overarching theme of this entertaining and interesting book often seems to be: “look at these fucking squares!”
And that’s important, because the author points out their illiberal, short sighted, and irrational views, the reactionary nature of those views. But the author turns it into yet another A vs. B situation; a linear spectrum. There’s the “renegades” and the “squares.” I’m absolutely on board with the idea that there are establishment squares to be derided. But just because The Man is stupid, doesn’t mean he’s got a monopoly on it.
The positive message is that “renegades” are exemplars of freedom, and especially the freedom to be wrong. If you aren’t free to make mistakes, you aren’t free. And the point of freedom (besides the fact that freedom is excellent) is that it allows a dispersed approach to figuring out the good life. I’m increasingly doubtful that The Hitchhikers’ Guide was anything but correct when it posited that Earth is a computer set in motion to determine the question that matches the answer to “Life, The Universe, and Everything” (the answer is 42, the question is something besides “What is 6×7?”). This history shows a number of instances that show how breaking from the status quo, actively doing what everyone else is convinced is wrong, contributes to the overall flourishing and success of later generations.
All told, I’m happy giving it 4 stars.
Failure and learning
The last few months I’ve been thinking about the relationship between failure and entrepreneurship. Just now I’m listening to a podcast and that old point came up: going to prison teaches you how to be a better criminal. You’d think that failed criminals would be the last sort of people to learn from, but really it’s just about the perfect sort of school. The general assumption is that people in prison have high discount rates, so they probably came into prison with one thing on their mind: what the hell went wrong with that last scheme?! So you’ve got dozens of people who all screwed up and that’s all their thinking about. That’s a whole lot better than you would get at a university; nobody at a school is thinking about how they screwed up, they’re thinking about how stupid other people are!
So the question is: how could you set up a system where the incentives of K-grad school teachers are constantly thinking about mistakes they’ve made and are able to pass those lessons on to their students? Sounds like science fiction to me.
What’s the One Big Change?
I enjoy idle speculation, and like many libertarians I like to speculate on the following question: If you could make one big change, what would it be? In other words, what’s the real big issue.
I’m increasingly convinced that the one big issue is immigration. If we opened borders internationally, world GDP would increase by an estimated 50-150%. World income would double! That’s incredible. All those people living on $2 per day would suddenly by doing significantly better if they could only be allowed to work for you!
And the benefits don’t stop there! Gains from trade! By now we all should understand that if I work for you it’s because I value my wages more than my time and you value my time more than the wages (and payroll taxes, and administrative costs) that you pay in order to hire me. So by letting poor people into America they gain by making their employers better off. Their employers are made better off by making their customers better off. You and I are those customers.
So why isn’t this already happenings. There are three basic oppositions.
- They’ll use public services without paying taxes.
- They’ll depress wages and steal jobs
- They might be dangerous. Either because they’ll commit crimes, or they’ll vote for stupid things (like restricting immigration).
I’m not including a more traditional reason for opposing liberalized immigration: xenophobia and racism. Xenophobia makes sense from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, but it’s not a legitimate reason, and it’s one we can choose to be bigger than.
Okay, so point one, simple solution: give anyone who wants one a work visa. Problem solved. Anyone can come here, but nobody is automatically eligible for public services. They’re above board, on the grid, we can see them, and if they commit crimes they’re out. But they’re obliged to pay into a system that they can’t exploit.
Point two: empirical evidence is that the only group in America genuinely negatively affected are high school dropouts. Want to increase high school graduation rates? Increase the cost of dropping out by letting in immigrants. Everyone else is made more productive because immigrants have different skills than natives, creating opportunities for gains from trade. They are complementary to us, and so make us better off by working along side us. Imagine a lone man on an island. He’s a baker. If he meets another marooned baker, it’s nice, but not as nice as if he meets a marooned butcher.
Point three: first off, getting rid of illegal immigration will make it easier to keep people safe from the foreign menace. Second, immigrants currently have lower incarceration rates than natives. Besides, it’s cheaper to punish them: just deport criminals. No feeding, sheltering, and clothing them; just ship them off. For voting: again, just give them a worker’s visa that doesn’t let them vote.
So what’s the takeaway? A simple policy of letting people come into the U.S. to live and work will make nearly everyone better off, especially the world’s desperately poor. America’s poorest (high school drop outs) may suffer, but there are fairly simple ways to address that. Here’s one: use a slice of the tax revenue from the new immigrants to pay for GED’s, and a stipend to give these folks time to study and pass the test. If they aren’t willing to do that, then that’s on them. If they have some disability that prevents it (maybe they dropped out because of undiagnosed learning disorders), then address those problems, because with that increased tax revenue we can afford to. And anyone born after 1999 is responsible for graduating high school and will be told the costs of failing to do so.
What do we get out of it? International poverty reduction, local wealth increase, a more cosmopolitan society, and a better, more humane world.
The subsidies a…
The subsidies and protections that New Zealand governments once doled out so generously to both agricultural and manufacturing interests had consequences. The economic way of thinking enables one to discern these consequences more clearly and to predict the consequences of alternative policies. Doing so will often clarify the origin of the subsidies and protections, at least for anyone who believes that democratic legislators pay attention to the interests that are paying attention to them.
From Paul Heyne’s Are Economists Basically Immoral.
Fantastic phrasing of the issue of rent seeking. I think skeptics like to think the public choice theorists are cynical for assuming that political actors act in their self interest; this quote turns that view on its head.
Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy
Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has, and It’s Not a Democracy
A new scientific study from Princeton researchers… found that in fact, America is basically an oligarchy.
“Princeton” concludes?! “A new scientific study…”?! This is some sloppy journalism that you should immediately ignore. But it gets worse…
“Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does,” Gilens and Page write. “Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.
“But we tend to doubt it.”
That’s the close of the article; these “scientists” are about as unsophisticated as the journalist reporting it. They repeat the same old adages about inequality that don’t really mean much: The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting less richer, and (we wrongly assume) membership in these groups is stable over time. Their conclusion is basically “rich, powerful interests promote their own interests… if only the middle class was in charge to promote the public good instead of their own interests!”
And yet, I think there’s something worth reading here. I think the conclusion that the U.S. is an oligarchy is roughly correct. The importance of politically connected individuals and lobbying groups affects wealth creation and distribution. This is an example of where the Left and Right should agree with libertarians: centralization of political power is leading to wasteful rent seeking that weakens the economy (Right/libertarian) and the outcome is that politically powerful groups are given an unfair advantage (Left/libertarian).
We know that Democrats are libertarian on social issues (and this is one of them!) and Republicans are libertarian on economic issues (ditto), but we hit a snag. Each group tends to see the faults of the other party’s pet projects and miss the root causes. Republicans see Democrats centralizing power and weakening property rights and step in to save the victim: businesses. The result is pro-business policy recommendations that also centralize power. The Democrats see this and step in to save the victim: the little guy (poor people and consumers). The result is centralization of power that creates rent seeking opportunities for big business!
The Knowledge P…
The Knowledge Problem
Comprehensive planning, the classic doctrine of planning advocates, seeks to achieve economic coordination without relying on the contention of separate decisionmakers with one another; it thereby deprives itself of access to one of the most important sources of knowledge exhibited by these kinds of orders. Just as in biological competition, there is the “information bearer” function of DNA, so in the society of Tradition, this function is further served by such developments as language and culturally acquired techniques and habits. In the society of Market, profit and loss signals are added to this array. In the society of Planning, there is no new information bearer and those of the Market are discarded. It is this lack that gives the knowledge problem argument its force.
From National Economic Planning: What is Left? by Don Lavoie
Regulation doesn’t have to mean licensure!
In my effort to become more misinformed I’ve started listening to the news. On PBS Newshour I learned that the National Taxpayer Advocate is pushing to restrict who can professionally prepare tax returns. It turns out the Institute for Justice is (so far) successfully beating back these efforts.
So why is anyone concerned? Surely because it’s poor people going to (potentially unqualified) preparers. Why not just go to H.R. Block? They’re cheap and trustworthy, but poor people probably make their decision of where to go the same way they decide how to bank. They want someone local and personal. That’s not going to change. Back to Newshour:
If you have someone who’s– who’s not ethical or doesn’t know what they’re doing, they’d have even more incentive to not sign a tax return and kind of just operate in the shadows.
I think that’s the correct prediction. Create licensure, and poor people will be less protected. Frankly, I doubt that even certification will make a difference; I think Joe Blow’s decision of who to get to prepare his return won’t be likely to change. What I think would help is a simplified tax code, and especially as it treats poor people.
Polystate – book 3
This is my nth response to Polystate and covers the third and final portion of the book (for the 1st through n-1th responses see here, here, and here).
As a quick reminder, the purpose of this book is to consider a possible political structure where individuals choose their own government (“anthrostate”) and these governments operate in the same geographic area (under a “polystate”). This is in contrast to the current system of geographical monopolies on coercion (“geostates”).
Book three attempts to identify insoluble problems with the idea of a polystate. The first problem is the potential for bureaucracy explosion (no, not that kind). A greater (which is to say any) degree of customized service in our current government would surely come with increased costs. There may be technological solutions to this problem, and competition between anthrostates would surely add pressure to get around these costs. In any event, the administrative questions are actually quite interesting. I suspect that many government services would end up moving back into civil society and private markets and the result would be lower monitoring costs in the case of civil society (e.g. for social security through mutual aid societies), and greater use of specialization and innovation in the case of market goods (e.g. for safety standards).
Another big one is the importance of “sacred locations.” If we had always lived in a polystate, Jerusalem might be considered a state of mind. But in the world we live in, it’s a geographical location, and different groups want it for themselves. A market with private property allows these groups to express the importance of this location by outbidding others for its purchase, but such a system is likely not good enough for some members of the relevant groups, and it’s plausible that violence could be resorted to. At the risk of sounding like an insensitive social Darwinist… maybe that’s not the worst possible outcome?… But certainly still a bad, though the root problem is the beliefs of those people; determining which political structure (all of which have costs and benefits) is “best” is an interesting question.
I think the biggest area of potential contention (by non-libertarians) is demonstrated by the issue of gun control. One anthrostate’s gun control is meaningless if it coexists with another that doesn’t have gun control. In other words, a polystate is less polycentric confederacy and more anarchist default plus an odd contract structure for particular firms. This leads to the final problem: transition.
The epilogue discusses the “issue” that the proposal is for a minimal polystate. We can think of this as a contemplation of federalism. This is a thought experiment in radical federalism that is so far down the spectrum of possibilities that it puts the onus of governance on the individual. In many ways, discussions by libertarian political economists can be thought of more as discussions of federalism than discussions of liberty; I think it’s worth thinking about the connection between federalism and freedom, as well as different potential forms of federalism.
Here are my overall thoughts: The book presents an interesting thought experiment and the author does an excellent job of providing well thought out analysis without going overboard. There is plenty to think about, and plenty more discussion to be had (note: read this book with friends and discuss it over beers). ZW had a choice of going into more detail and making a stronger case, or going into less detail and leaving more of the thought experiment to the reader. I think he perfectly balanced these two goals.
Note: an ungated version of that last link is available here. The article is “Afraid to be free: Dependency as desideratum” by James Buchanan.
Polystate: Book 2
This is my third entry on Polystate and will cover book 2 (entries one and two covered book 1). This section covers a thought experiment in polystates and begins immediately with the flattering implication that macroeconomists can make speculative predictions about complex systems. This is typically where an Austrian would say “the world is too complex to make speculative predictions which is why we need a flexible system.”
Quick reminder: a polystate is a state that contains non-geographical anthrostates. Anthrostates have rules relevant to their members, while polystates have rules relevant to the interaction of anthrostates and their members.
My first qualm with ZW’s conception of anthrostates is that there are local spillovers in governance, culture, etc. that would likely lead to enclaves. ZW addresses this now with rule number one of polystates being that no anthrostate may claim territory. My general feeling on federalism is that the higher units will have rules that are more universally accepted, so that a nation will have prohibitions on murder, while regions of states/provinces may have fairly uniform rules on abortion, drug use, etc., individual states have their own traffic laws, and cities have their own rules on neighborly conduct. Polystates are a radical form of federalism, but in order for them to work adequately, they must start with fairly uniform basic rules on property rights over land.
Rule two is that individuals choose their anthrostate annually (by birthday). The specific interval is fairly arbitrary but it seems obvious that it should be neither too long (in which case anthrostates gain monopoly power) or too short (in which case they can’t credibly commit to govern in difficult situations such as collecting taxes or enforcing punishments). The alternative to a time-based restriction would be a social-stigma based restriction which has pros and cons of its own but I’m tempted to think would be more effective (though with some very important caveats that warrant further discussion!). The birthday rule is interesting as it staggers political change leading to greater stability than having “global revolution” at each shift; we face a similar problem in today’s world of election days.
Rule three is where things get tricky: anthrostates that take territory lose their government status under the polystate order. This creates a collective action problem among other anthrostates as enforcing this rule won’t be free and won’t have uniform benefits to others. ZW recognizes this, but the problem still stands. This is essentially the same as the national defense problem. This is really the big one: are geostates unnecessary but inevitable? Essentially this book is considering a special form of anarchy and so belongs in the same category of other classic thought experiments.
It obviously isn’t statelessness, and so it isn’t quite anarchy, but I’m not so sure anarchy is quite anarchy either. Even the sort of state imagined by David Friedman has coercion, it’s just decentralized. Likewise, polystates specifically allow anthrostates to act coercively, but it subjects them to competition. In essence, the polystate proposal is to increase competition among governance structures by allowing them to be geographically diffuse.
An interesting institutional feature of polystates is that anthrostates are no longer bound to seek something like an end state. Where as the USA tries to set up a system for the median voter who is expected to be there for life, an anthrostate could specialize in particular stages of individuals’ lives. There could be a state for students and one for seniors (… I wonder what a world with AARP running an anthrostate would look like…).
ZW doesn’t mention this, but if individuals can be members of more than one anthrostate (of course, based on the rules and enforcement of those rules by the relevant anthrostates) then it is conceivable that government services not be so horizontally integrated. This raises an interesting line of inquiry: is a polycentric polystate possible?
A big problem is the “inherent goodness” of imposing rules on people who don’t want them. It’s easy for libertarians to say that drug laws are dumb (because they are), but as Ryan Murphy surely writes somewhere, where people see value/justification in imposing their views on others we run into problems. We’re pretty much all cool with prohibiting murder, but what about less clear cut issues? If I saw veganism as having the same moral weight as murder (“I don’t think humans should be treated like that.”) then I would be morally justified in striking down with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers with icky lentils. The best solution would be for me to stay the hell away from Berkeley. Again, we’ve got local spillovers in governance. We also have tribalistic barriers to the sort of integration economists want to see for the good of everyone.
In the final section on war ZW raises an interesting point regarding the possibility of war-mongers self-selecting into aggressive anthrostates. This is a troubling notion, but such behavior is expensive. North Korea is aggressive, but manageable because Kim Jong Un isn’t wealthy enough to pose a more drastic threat to NATO. With self-sorting, a North Korean anthrostate would lose many of its productive people and be even less of a threat. But ZW doesn’t raise the question of nuclear weapons…
The example of Kidnappocracy drives home the point that ultimately coercion underlies any system of governance. Rights are as rights are enforced. Political structures are created to resolve rights disputes in an amicable (sort of) fashion, and polystates will still need means of resolving these disputes. Even in a geostate, some people are willing to fight and die for their views, but the institutional change to a polystate seems somewhat orthogonal to such issues. Anthrostates will serve as focal points, and having more disparate focal points may increase the possibility for conflict. But mostly it would just be a different sort of federalism; if we don’t see violence between people from different states, and if effective institutions emerge quickly enough, this problem may be small and quickly swamped by other benefits.
Ultimately the resolution of problems between members of different anthrostates would require that 1) their disputes are matters of honest disagreement that can be resolved with arbitration, 2) interactions that may lead to such disputes are minimized by a general refusal to interact, or 3) there is a strong and near universal support for (this sort of) federalism such that people are willing to resolve differences to support the overarching system. The second seems most likely, supporting the hypothesis that geostates will typically be more successful even if they will be less prosperous.
I come away increasingly convinced that perhaps the most fundamental aspect of governance is geographical sorting. I don’t like geostates (I don’t think many people truly do), but I think geographically localized governance is effective because it reduces interaction by people with contradictory conceptions about good behavior and so reduces conflict while supporting order. I think ZW’s ideas are largely influenced by a sort of a sci-fi view (that I’m highly sympathetic to) which reflects the sort of governance we see on the Internet. 4chan is a very different place from Facebook and every subreddit has it’s own unique culture. In such a world, “geography” is a different matter; it takes a different form, but it’s still there.
Would you buy “Made in USA by Rich White People”?
You need your lawn mowed,do you hire the kid down the block who’s saving money for a car, or a surgeon? First off, the kid obviously needs the money more. And that matters. Second, do you really want to pull the doctor away from saving lives? What if he isn’t saving lives? He’s still improving lives. This applies to any productive person (okay, maybe not lawyers). This doctor could be doing things I think are a total waste, but the people paying him disagree with you; as long as they’re paying their own way, who am I to disagree?
What am I getting at here? By world standards (and especially by historical standards) American workers are incredibly productive and wealthy. Yeah, everyone’s got money problems, and the mortgage isn’t paying itself, and prices are rising, and all the rest. But at the end of the day, having an American worker do something a Bangladeshi could is analogous to having a surgeon do something a teenager could. Are working conditions in the third world good? No. Should you be concerned with the well-being of Americans? Yes. Does this justify buying American? No! A resounding no!
On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human
Is Stephen Hawking more machine than man? The author makes an apt comparison between Hawking and other high profile people with assistants. That comparison should show (contrary to the emphasis the author makes elsewhere) that it’s not so much man/machine, so much as distributed cognition (is that the right term?). And understood as such, this phenomenon is one that we all engage in, and increasingly so in the modern world of mass literacy, peaceful coexistence, pens, paper, and smart phones.
Hawking is the focal point of his network. It’s interesting to note that his output is largely the output of his network, but it’s still directed by him. We should be no more disappointed that he doesn’t do his own calculations than we should be that we don’t wash our own laundry by hand. Hawking can’t do the mechanical, he can only do the thinking. Having assistance surely improves the quality of his thinking, but it is still his mind that we are concerned with. Are his assistants getting short shrift? They aren’t getting the sort of celebrity that Hawking gets, but in their own networks they will certainly do well to be part of his team; his students will have valuable letters of recommendation.
It’s an interesting article that provides insight into how Stephen Hawking works, but it ends on an odd note:
Because, surrounded as we are by our world of technology and digital information, aren’t we all disabled? We, like Hawking, like Obama and his brain trust, are unable to think and complete the results of our thoughts without being attached to a network of people, instruments, machines – and the living laboratories through which it is all distributed.
We are all (Hawking included) able to think without assistance. Yes, our thinking is enhanced by cooperation with others (in conversation and debate, consultation, etc.). Yes, we all require some interface between our thoughts and our audience, whether that’s a pen and paper or a computer, but I think the way to think of it is that we are enabled. Enhancing our thinking isn’t cheating.
Polystate, part 2
After much distraction I’m back to continue my review of Polystate: A Thought Experiment in Distributed Government (part 1 is here). But now that I think about it, this isn’t so much a review, as a book club (of one…) where I respond to the book.
In this section, ZW gets into the benefits of polystates. He starts with the benefit of choice. Someone born into North Korea is utterly screwed, but someone born into an unattractive anthrostate can simply leave when they reach the age of consent. The reverse is also true: someone may join an anthrostate that the rest of us see as distasteful. Want to join a cult? You’re free to. The thought of that possibility will certainly make your inner-paternalist squeamish, but remember that if you aren’t free to make mistakes, you simply aren’t free.
Another benefit I wouldn’t have thought of is that traditionally problematic systems of government have a higher chance of success when they are separated from geography. For example:
It may be that the failure of collectivization has not got to do with the individual so much as the aggregate. If 95% of people work poorly in a collectivized environment, any random collectivized farm will perform poorly. But it may be the case that 5% of people would excel in such an environment.
I would expect a communist to protest that geographic seclusion is necessary to create New Communist Man. How are people supposed to learn how to shed their egoism if they cannot help but see the vulgar bourgeoisie all around them? But that sword cuts both ways and shows a benefit of polystates ZW didn’t bring up: a child raised in a fascist anthrostate can see non-fascists and so make a more informed decision of whether to stick with fascism when they get older.
ZW sees the polystate as offering a sort of decentralized Tiebout competition. That covers the demand side (what benefits to provide to whom). Adding in the supply side (who will face what opportunity costs) raises the problem of economic calculation in socialism. But ZW takes it in a different direction, hypothesizing that sorting between anthrostates would lessen decision making costs due to more homogeneous populations.
Choice ensures we get more of what we want with less hassle but also provides the option of exit at low cost. Taking geography out of the equation means that there is a larger number of potential state-competitors, as well as more credible movement on the part of citizens.
He raises an interesting problem related to a recent post of mine:
[T]here may be a difference between good governance and governance which pleases one’s constituency… But, regardless of the philosophy of good government, there is an extent to which good governance must have to do with what voluntary citizens decide is good.
First off: No! Government and governance are two different things! But putting that aside, the big problem we face is how to not just aggregate preferences (a difficult problem in itself), but how to ensure that (or even determine if) our method of aggregation results in something good.
I think cable TV is pretty good at giving people what they want, but I also think that the product is overwhelmingly bad. It’s not a big deal with TV because there are so many alternative sources of entertainment and information (although cable news might have existential dangers). Similarly, I think government broadly gives people what they want (not peace and prosperity, but xenophobia, “doing something,” paternalism, and the like) but that’s not a good thing. The idea of the U.S. senate was to prevent people from having too much choice so that good institutions could be preserved. So could the degree of choice offered by polystates be to much? On the other hand, how could you determine an answer without incorporating the revealed preferences of the governed?
Finally, ZW gets into an especially meaty benefit of anthrostates: peace. It’s hard to start a war with a disbursed enemy (“semi-random geographic distribution), and hard to finance one when your citizens can switch to a more peaceful government. This could be especially important in avoiding territory disputes as humans explore and colonize space (for example, if resources on the moon become valuable enough to justify the expense of following Newt Gingrich up there).
That concludes Book 1 of Polystate, and that’s where I’ll stop for now. I’ll be picking through the book fairly slowly, so I recommend that you buy the book for yourself!
A thought on competition
“Start-ups, or market entries lead to new business development, whereas incumbent firms might be forced to dissolve by the increased competition of the new firms. More indirectly, the new businesses and the removal of older, perhaps less efficient businesses, might lead to improved competitiveness and economic growth.”
From van Praag and Versloot (2007).
The above quote is from a paper on entrepreneurship. Pretty much anyone who studies entrepreneurship has at least passing familiarity with some aspects of Austrian economics. The above quote struck me for showing the difference between the mainstream view of competition and the Austrian view. For Austrians competition is a process; you compete with rivals by offering better terms to potential trading partners. For mainstream economists competition is a state; when there are lots of market actors there is competition.
The first use of competition is Austrian: new firms out-compete old firms. The second is mainstream: getting rid of inefficient firms leads to “improved competitiveness.” They don’t write “entry of new firms force old firms to be more competitive,” but “a change in the makeup of the market results in more competition.”
I think a lot of mainstream, equilibrium based economics is really just short-hand for the complex processes Austrians think about. But I think people forget that it’s shorthand and that leads to thinking about the economy statically, like some thing with a certain arrangement that can probably be rearranged. The difference between the two concepts of competition is a reflection of this. A market with lots of different firms is probably competitive, but that’s no guarantee. We need to think about how long those firms have been doing what they’re doing, and that leads us to see how industries with few (or even one) firm may still face competition.
Notes On Liberty 