Tons of advances in efficiency, chemistry, operations, logistics. Oil prices fell dramatically, consistency and quality went up, supply went up through all of Standard's monopoly years. Breaking it up was far more about political factional conflict than it was about problems for consumers.
(Preemptively: Before anyone decides to jump on it, Rockefeller's rebate deal with the railroad wasn't above board. But Standard Oil was a huge net gain for the world. Absurdly so, actually.)
Being philanthropic is not mutually exclusive with owning an amoral or even unethical business.
Did you ever use Windows Millennium Edition?
There is no proper political right for a "consumer" to have a choice between multiple brands of a product. If there were such a right, it would be violated the moment they walked into a remote store that didn't happen to carry every single product currently sold on the market. Remember, rights are contextually absolute. Their purpose is to subjugate society to moral law. And the purpose of moral law is to make individual flourishing possible.
I'd love to see where you got that idea because it isn't true.
The first use of the word was by Aristotle, where he describes Thales of Miletus' (who was a private citizen) cornering of the market in olive presses as a monopoly[1]
It's true that later there were some government sanctioned monopolies, but it is a mischaracterization to say that the word's meaning has ever changed. It was well understood then that there were monopolies that weren't sanctioned by the government (eg, the guild system in Europe).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly#Historical_monopolies
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=monopoly
weren't sanctioned by the government (eg, the guild system in Europe).
No, this proves my point exactly. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guild. Here's the fourth sentence: "They often depended on grants of letters patent by a monarch or other authority to enforce the flow of trade to their self-employed members, and to retain ownership of tools and the supply of materials."
To restate, the point is that many markets tend to wind up as monopolies or cartels. This turns out to be bad for the people making up society, and they (we) will not put up with it, so we pass laws against it.
This is why we have and use the words "monopoly" and "cartel". And other terms like "price fixing", "bid rigging", "market failure", etc.
Considering the origins of the word (monopōlion, from monos "single" and pōlein "sell."), that does not feel correct.
While there were a number of de-jure monopolies (English and Dutch East India companies in the 17th century for instance) the origin of the word comes from a natural monopoly (of olive presses).
Besides, rights are not contextually absolute, as exercising them may conflict with the rights of others.
If you are really trying to advance the theory that "the market", left to itself, won't generate monopoly after monopoly, perhaps you could point us to actual examples of those golden times when the absence of regulation served consumers more than they served business oligarchy.