Competition is a wasteful product of corruption, and fair practices result from collaborative individual contribution

At the outset anti-trust laws look like they function to perpetuate competition and that seems to suggest competition is the key to a healthy environment and that collaboration is bad. But the real value in anti-trust laws is to promote healthy collaboration and make companies earn their own bread - the same principle as each man producing what he enjoys with his own two hands.

Anti-trust laws prohibit companies from rigging prices and markets to earn profits without creating value. The way the law should enforce this, is by making each company work for its individual survival. Companies should not rely on other companies to sustain it with unmerited profit agreements. Because once a company no longer has to concern itself with the quality of its own output, or matching the benefit it receives by its individual performance... it no longer benefits from fair behavior and contributing to the collective - it benefits more for the company to leverage its position to gain more unmerited profit and to acquire more power not by production of value. Same as people.

When companies have to work for themselves to earn profit, it benefits them to make collaborations that are healthy for the collective market. Costs go down for companies working together and output cheaper, higher quality products. The key here is collaborative efforts must be for cooperating companies to mutually contribute the value of its individual product for another company to improve the other's product. It's supposed to be a team project where ideally everyone contributes equally and in diverse ways so the group achieves a greater presentation than any individual on its own.

In practice what happens is one or two people out of five have any competence to do the project, and they have to do more work for five people than they would on their own and the other three people fake having done work to contribute. But in an ideal world, companies will not partner with incompetent non-contributers if the playing field promotes fair play where each company earns by its product the profits it deserves. Anti-trust laws should be meant to allow the ideal team project collaboration, and prevent the corrupt mandatory team project with non-contributing companies in positions of power. The rationale for having anti-trust laws is not an argument against cooperation.

Corrupt people who want to abuse power and use others work for their own gain have disseminated a false perception that our need for anti-trust laws is because all good things come from competition and that their competing for power is beneficial when it is actually wasteful and harmful to the survival of the collective. The principle is false that companies best serve the population when they compete exclusively for their own profit. Corporate wars for dominance are a waste of resources to the consumers and the employees that sustain the industry. It is not the competitive process that needs to be protected, but process that 'the quality of my product determines the amount of profit I earn' that keeps things healthy.

Anti-trust law is actually an advocate that cooperation among companies is good - and therefore that cooperation must be protected from corrupt competitive companies looking out for themselves. A law to prevent corrupt companies from entering collaborations without actually contributing any work. To keep powerful companies from gaining unmerited benefit through arrangements instead of through the quality of their product.

Competition among powerful corporations is not good for the consumer. Competition reduces quality of product to bare minimum. McDonald's, Walmart are dominant and found everywhere because they are competitive - not because the product they offer is the highest quality. When companies are allowed to freely compete, the powerful companies become more powerful and care less about the quality of their product than eliminating their competition.

This perception that anti-monopoly is *for* competition is ridiculous. Anti-monopoly is *against* free competition, because competition strives to eliminate its competitors not keep them around!... The way anti-monopoly law keeps companies in a false theatrics of competition is to set arbitrary rules that prevent the most powerful from competing against the weak. This concept doesn't work.

Encouraging companies to compete and gain disproportionate power then fixing an artificial ceiling on them, hoping they will abide by the rules and agree to not use their power to eliminate threats to growing its power. It's a show. Companies will work to rewrite the laws or get around them, but they won't change their practices.

Government run corporations is an result of allowing free competition, not banning it. The most powerful organization beats all its competition, using all the resources available to it - the government. Every time another group contests it, the government is allowed to use whatever competitive advantage it possesses - including the military - to win. That's what free competition really means.

This fiction of a free market in which each new company is able to compete fairly with the most powerful existing company is a contradiction. In order not to be wiped clean off the face of the earth, the small company must be given an enormous handicap preventing the large company from freely competing against it. A big company can stall a fight against a small company, lose some profits and move on, whereas a small company goes bankrupt if it doesn't make a return on investment right away.

And the majority of start-ups do fail because the reality is companies *are* allowed to freely compete and that means the big company can crush any small company it chooses to. Lawyers, capital, contracts - all are things no start-up can match up against. The reasons a tiny fraction of start-ups do survive is through one of the big investors (a financial company providing the capital) decides this little pit fighter can make it some money in the ring with betting (stock prices), and takes it under its protection.

Here's how a cycle of corruption begins. Fair practices come from individuals who produce the rewards they enjoy with their own hands, their gain is limited by the natural limits of the quality and productiveness of their work. This leads to healthy cooperation, in which each member contributes to a collective effort and their individual work is utilized more effectively and achieve more with their work. When the collaboration reaches a sufficient surplus, it allows members of the group to gain benefit without contributing. There is a turning point towards corruption when individuals gain benefits that they do not produce themselves, and it becomes more advantageous for them to use their unmerited benefits to acquire more unmerited benefits, rather than improving the quality of their individual contribution.

Competition and corruption go hand in hand. Corruption is the act or intention of gaining unmerited benefit. Gains in unmerited benefits translates into a growth of power. Powerful individuals seek to acquire more power, to prevent other powerful individuals from taking away their source of unmerited benefit. Power in individuals gives rise to competition. Competition is really in essence a process of acquiring a benefit beyond which one's own work merits.

The whole point of the competition is to acquire unmerited benefit beyond that of individual work! So that two equally worthy individuals compete for a position whereby one receives the bulk of the benefits and the other does not. It is not proportionate to award the winner the benefits that the loser does not receive. But there would be no incentive to compete if both contestants were rewarded the same regardless of the outcome. Competition is a act of acquiring a unmerited benefit - at the most benign level it is still a form of seeking mild corruption.

You can say a professional athlete for example has deserved the benefits he receives for competing. Yes the athlete who wins has earned benefits for the work he has put in, but this doesn't mean the gains he is seeking is proportionate to his labor. One athlete has to win at the expense of another, no matter how worthy (or not) both contestants are. The intention is to have two roughly equally worthy individuals and disproportionately give the slightly better one more rewards than the other, to make one want to beat the other.


Corruption makes competition worthwhile. Without the incentive of unmerited benefit, you couldn't gain advantage by beating anyone. Your best interests would be to match the amount of sacrifice you make through labor in order to meet your individual need for benefits. The guy with more benefits has no more advantage than the guy with less, if he is forced to sacrifice his an equivalent amount of his other assets in time and labor for that benefit. In the absence of a corrupting process to turn merited benefit into unmerited benefit, he could only use that benefit on himself or for altruism, and if it is more than he can use on himself, the excess benefit does gain anything more for himself - so the excess doesn't turn into an ever growing need to acquire more excess.

If people were satisfied to produce with their own two hands every benefit they sought, it wouldn't matter who acquires more benefits - because that benefit would be balanced out with equal parts sacrifice through time and labor. That individual wouldn't end up with any more than the person whose work balanced their needs. It's because people are able to gain benefits without making equivalent sacrifice, that they have the incentive to compete to acquire more benefits than someone else in order to 'win' a seat of power to acquire more and more unmerited benefits.

"What you call a social position consists in the privilege of capital and education. Unwealthy and uneducated people earn their crust of bread by physical labor, and I see no reason why I should be an exception."
- Misail Poloznev
from Anton Chekhov's short story My Life.