

Perfect Competition Is Bad for Growth - brownbat
http://growthecon.wordpress.com/2014/11/15/perfect-competition-is-bad-for-growth/

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bediger4000
This article is slanted to an owner's point of view: the firm can't make huge
profits if there's perfect competition. The rest of us do want perfect
competition, and the author admits that, albeit rather deep in the article:

 _But perfect competition does maximize the combined consumer and producer
surplus from a given product._

The author also believes in a falsehood:

 _Nullifying patents (or any other kind of intellectual property) would crush
the incentives to innovate, and we’d never get any new products._

This isn't true. Holland and Switzerland deliberately industrialized without
patents ([http://www.amazon.com/Industrialization-Without-National-
Pat...](http://www.amazon.com/Industrialization-Without-National-Patents-
Netherlands/dp/0691041970)).

This article therefore advocates for setting "intellectual property" controls
too far towards the owner/firm's favor.

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thirstywhimbrel
> This article therefore advocates for setting "intellectual property"
> controls too far towards the owner/firm's favor.

I don't think that's an accurate read of the article.

If you make it to the last paragraph it just says there are no right answers.
and argues against both abolishing all IP and against perpetual rights for
rightsholders.

If anything, the sin of the article is that it stakes out a completely
pedestrian claim (IP should exist and apply for limited times) after dressing
it up with a provocative intro.

That aside, there is some practical wisdom that could have been extracted from
the provocative intro. When you're making a pitch, you have to explain to the
investor how you're angling for monopolistic rents. Or, ok, maybe you don't
use the "m" word, but you dress it up more softly as why you're _uniquely_
positioned or skilled to help serve the market / seize this new opportunity.
It all boils down to the same thing though: why shouldn't they just invest in
Walmart?

