First, let's quickly define a monopoly as a market in which most of the goods or services sold in that market come from a single provider. In the limit, all of the goods or services come from only one provider. If this provider is a true saint, then he or she will provide the goods or services at high quality and at a price which can easily be borne by those who need these goods and services. But monopolists usually are not saints. So they naturally tend to charge the highest price they can get away with in order to provide the trashiest goods and services they can get away with - even if the combination of high price and trashy quality eventually bankrupts most buyers in the market.
Monopolies can arise seemingly naturally under certain circumstances. For instance, in the North American West in the 19th century, executives of powerful railroad companies argued that their monopoly control of certain transportation markets was a natural outcome of the railroad business and therefore should not be opposed or interfered with. This argument seems to have a certain validity in that sometimes the introduction of a transformative new technology like rail transportation requires so many resources that only a few players can enter the market for this new technology. Thus a hundred-acre dirt farmer in 19th-century Iowa would not have been able to afford building his own railroad. To consider space travel as another example, it is certainly true that for a long time, the only entities that were capable of sending rockets (and eventually humans) into orbit were the governments of large and wealthy nations. Thus a 1960's geeky kid in a working-class family would not have been able to build her own rocket to fly to the moon. However, it is also true that those players who were able to dominate capital-intensive new markets frequently did so not only because these markets required a potential player to have lots of resources, but also because some of these players relied on dirty tricks. To see how this played out in the 19th-century North American railroad market, please read "For tech giants, a cautionary tale from 19th century railroads on the limits of competition", The Conversation, March 2018.
I would argue that it is these dirty tricks that are the dominant factor in the creation of the most recent monopolies and oligopolies which have dominated both the American and global economies over the last five or six decades. One particular dirty trick is the use of "predatory pricing", which is the practice of a player entering a market in order to destroy competitors by selling the goods offered in that market at a price below the price at which other players can offer those same goods. What is interesting is that the wanna-be monopolist player need not be a very big business at first - just as long as he or she has a huge cash reserve backing him or her up. That way, he or she can stay afloat even while selling at a loss for a long time, while driving his or her competitors out of business due to the fact that these competitors cannot afford to stay in business if they don't sell at or above a certain price point.
The harm caused by predatory pricing and the role of this pricing practice in the building of monopolies has been well-documented. In December 2024, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (under the outgoing presidency of Joe Biden) hosted a virtual workshop titled, "Competition Snuffed Out: How Predatory Pricing Harms Competition, Consumers, and Innovation." The topics discussed in this workshop are also captured in a January 2025 article written by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance titled, "Competition Snuffed Out: Stacy Mitchell Testifies at FTC Workshop on Predatory Pricing." Mitchell starts out by describing the predatory pricing practicing of the Amazon businesses of Jeff Bezos over the last 30 years. But Amazon is by no means the only near-monopoly which has been built over the last several decades in the U.S. There are also Wal-Mart and other large retail chains which wiped out many locally-owned mom-and-pop small convenience stores, as well as the Whole Foods "health food" store chain which wiped out many locally-owned smaller countercultural health food stores. There is Uber with its predatory pricing and exploitation of so-called "independent contractor" drivers which wiped out many local taxi companies. (By the way, at last count, there was a rape or attempted rape in an Uber vehicle every eight minutes in the United States.) I would also argue that this may be true of the iFixit national electronics repair store chain, although I don't have concrete proof. Yet all of the businesses I have named in this paragraph are examples either of monopoly or of oligopoly in the making.
I would therefore also argue (as I have in a recent post) that Elon Musk's SpaceX company is an example of attempted monopoly-building via predatory pricing. Based on a link I provided in that recent post, Musk is selling access to low earth orbit (LEO) at a price per kilogram of payload that is significantly lower than the price at which other launch providers are able to send satellites into LEO. However, we also know that SpaceX is a money-losing business which has most likely not paid U.S. taxes since it was founded in 2002. (See also "The Final Frontier of Tax Avoidance: Elon Musk’s SpaceX Has $1.9 Billion to Gain from Defunding the IRS", Matthew Gardner, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, June 2026.) Thus Musk has a number of ways to cushion the pain (which I'm sure he hopes will be temporary) of selling high-value goods and services at a loss!
Now we can certainly decry and condemn the desires and goals of those businesses which engage in predatory pricing in attempting to create monopolies. And we can also decry and condemn the effects which these monopolies have on the rest of us once these monopolies are firmly established. But we must also ask what kind of people we ourselves are that we allow such predatory arrangements to arise in the first place. To quote Gene Sharp once again,
"Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak, and the government too strong. Without a change in this imbalance, a new set of rulers can, if they wish, be just as dictatorial as the old ones."
And,
"Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. [Emphasis added.] Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors."
Dictatorships can be entirely governmental, or they can start out as economic hegemonies that morph into political hegemonies. And note that what Gene Sharp says about governments that are too strong applies just as firmly to businesses whose owners become too rich, even if the governments in the nations where these rich people reside are weak. Thus do greedy piece-of-garbage heads of business like Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos become the backers of piece-of-garbage heads of state like Donald Bump and political parties like the Rethuglicans. But these people can become powerful only if we give them that power. We too frequently give these people such power by being lured by the store-on-every-street corner convenience, the glitzy gizmo features, and the too-good-to-be-true low prices of their wares. This convenience, functionality and cheapness act as a sort of bait - rather like the sugar water in certain commercially available ant baits. However, the poor witless ants who chow down on that sugar water fail to notice that it's laced with borax. And it's the borax that kills them.
I have mentioned the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, which is an organization which seeks to use advocacy and political action to eliminate monopolistic and predatory practices in the American economy. I am all in favor of their aims and goals. Yet it seems to me that trying to use policy recommendations, advocacy and political action to achieve such goals in these days is about as hard as trying to build my own transcontinental railroad or to build my own rocket to fly to Mars. To me it's much better and more direct to figure out on a personal and local level how to decouple from a predatory economy. What can I do at a grassroots level to achieve this? My answer to this question is as follows: Become frugal and learn to be content with what I have. Learn to be personally self-sufficient. Learn not to need or want certain things or to buy things from certain people. (For instance, I haven't bought anything from Target or Amazon in a long time!) And find other like-minded people in my local community and in my circle of acquaintances with whom I can form small localized collectives of communal self-reliance. If enough of us follow this path, we will be to the monopolists what grass eventually is to concrete - namely, a soft, subtle, yet eventually shattering force - an ineluctable, silent, bottom-up change that does not become noticed until it's too late for those at the top.
