> Internally, companies have full on top down planning just like governments. At larger companies this often results in silly levels of inefficiency.

This leads to Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm.

" for Coase the main reason to establish a firm is to avoid some of the transaction costs of using the price mechanism. These include discovering relevant prices (which can be reduced but not eliminated by purchasing this information through specialists), as well as the costs of negotiating and writing enforceable contracts for each transaction (which can be large if there is uncertainty). Moreover, contracts in an uncertain world will necessarily be incomplete and have to be frequently re-negotiated. The costs of haggling about division of surplus, particularly if there is asymmetric information and asset specificity, may be considerable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm#Transaction...

“Internally, companies have full on top down planning just like governments.”

They are basically run like communist states. 5 year plans, celebrating plan achievement and so on. It’s all there. The only difference is that their outside borders aren’t protected so they can’t become as delusional as a communist state can be.

> Meaningful markets account for a relatively small portion of modern economies.

There's no way that's true. Like, how many monopolies in America, say, can you even name? I've almost never in my entire life been in a situation when I literally only had one choice for a product or service, even in areas of so called natural monopolies.

Edit: Actually I can name some true monopolies: NBA, NFL, etc.

I would add, Patent protected drug companies, local electric company’s, railroads, water, cable TV, etc and arguably IP including Books, Movies, Games etc are true monopolies. Don’t forget governments as the Social Security, FBI, etc does not compete on an open market. Collectively, government spending is a huge portion of the economy.

OPEC (Oil) and De Beers (Diamonds) are not true monopolies, however they have enough control over supply to have pricing power.

But as I alluded to, Walmart’s 2.3 million employees don’t use markets internally to set prices for services. IT, Legal, HR, etc are not separate companies. Instead executives just allocate and get allocated money for a specific use.

It’s not obvious how you could measure such a wide range of hidden interactions collectively. But, market transactions have real overhead so it should be as not surprise it’s limited. After all your spouse will tell you to take out the trash rather than paying you to take out the trash.

That is not what monopolisation is:

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...