> You don’t get strong property rights without [a] strong state
Are there any states that don't forcefully take property and life without people's consent? States are well known for taxing their citizens and fighting wars.
There are certainly small communities that don't steal or murder from anyone, but scaling them up has many challenges. I'd argue cultural attitudes around property rights are more important to creating free societies than top down laws and enforcement. Obviously some legal framework and enforcement would be necessary.
> One thing that they have often done in the past, is to temporarily drop their prices to outcompete newcomers, making it impossible for newcomers to outcompete them, and raising their prices back up once the newcomer is gone.
Could you give examples of this happening? When the prices are low that sounds like a good outcome for their customers. Assuming the price drop doesn't affect other aspects customers care about like quality.
The problem is when prices are raised above what they would otherwise be in a competitive market. You phrased this as "once the newcomer is gone", but there isn't anything preventing another newcomer from emerging, or several. The action of raising prices is openly visible to the market. This will attract entrepreneurs to the industry as a result of the perceived success of the monopolistic firm. In other words greedily raising prices above what the market wants to pay is a suicidal move for a single firm that relies on its customers to continue to buy whatever it is selling. This opens a market opportunity for newcomers where it did not exist before the price hike as customers would be encouraged to look for an alternatives.
Monopolies backed by force are not reliant on their customers' voluntary decisions in this way so the analysis above only applies to situations that prevent forcing customers to choose a particular firm against their wishes.
> Why would it be worthwhile to compete with a dairy cartel? Of all the things one can do with capital, why go to war with a cartel over relatively small margins?
It may not be in Ontario. In a free market (i.e. one that respects property rights) it would be worthwhile. To see why, let me take your objections one by one.
Bribing competitors: The point of a cartel is to use force to prevent competition. Successful firms who are outcompeting their peers don't need to rely on force in this way, and enacting force is costly. The cost of the bribes must be factored into the cartels bottom line rendering them less efficient at meeting the market's needs. On the other hand the cartels inefficiencies require that the bribed competitors are leaving money on the table by taking the bribe instead of competing.
Blackmailing competitors: This supposes that you have some illegal or taboo information that can be used to blackmail competitors. This method of force will not work for any firms you cannot find dirt on. The cost of acquiring the blackmail is another source of inefficiency in the cartel at meeting the market's needs.
Stealing: Property rights are required in order to have a free market. Corrupt courts or enforcement of laws can prevent free markets from forming in the real world. Preventing corruption of these privileged offices is a difficult problem and could use more research.
Murdering: This is a special case of stealing as people own their own bodies so murder deprives them of their property.
> The underlying assumption that "things wash out" requires supposing that an extremely simplistic newtonian model of an economy where politics doesnt really occur.
I wasn't trying to say that "things wash out" no matter what. My point was that the circumstances surrounding monopolies affect their ability to prevent competition. It's easy to see that when an industry is doing well it attracts new competitors. Analyzing the reasons competitors are not able to compete in monopolized industries is the best way to understand how to prevent monopolies.
> There's plenty of pirated Windows around, but everybody still has to use Windows.
The threat of jail time for people sharing pirated copies or circumventing copyright protected measures changes the pros/cons people weigh whether or not some people copy or reverse engineer despite those risks. There would be a lot more competition if pirates weren't incurring all these additional risks and were able to compete fairly without state backed copyright monopolies.
> There are a million different factors that can drive monopolization
The primary driver is restricting competition. If your competition is unrestricted then why would they join your cartel when they can outcompete you? Someone will always see that they can get a larger piece of the pie by outcompeting the cartel. Monopolies always use force to prevent winning in fair competition.
I wonder what factors prevented competition with the "dairy cartel" in Ontario as would happen in a free market. Most likely there are restrictions on what products can be sold to willing customers that are costly for smaller firms to comply with. There may also be subsidies that have criteria that entrenched firms benefit from, but impose additional restrictions on how new firms can function.
> A cartel sets prices, and is one of the many ways markets are unfree.
That's true, but cartels can't enforce this. New or external firms can compete with the cartel. If a cartel reduces production or raises prices then it incentivizes competitors to meet the market demand with lower prices. The only way the cartel can exclude new firms is by controlling the entirety of some resource or enforcing the cartel usually in the form of lobbying for regulations.
> Markets do not instantly become monopolized, but they do tend that way, and will also eagerly form cartels unless stopped by regulation.
Monopolization requires control of land or resources. This is because any cartel's attempt to set artificially high prices can be undercut by new entrants to the market who aren't in the cartel.
> On the other hand, the market for software is not very regulated, it's heavily monopolised.
Software is monopolized primarily through regulated monopolies on software (re)production i.e. copyright.
Are there any states that don't forcefully take property and life without people's consent? States are well known for taxing their citizens and fighting wars.
There are certainly small communities that don't steal or murder from anyone, but scaling them up has many challenges. I'd argue cultural attitudes around property rights are more important to creating free societies than top down laws and enforcement. Obviously some legal framework and enforcement would be necessary.