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Re:The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice by throwaway132448 on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @06:19AM (#46525083)
I didn't say that free markets lead to monopolies: I qualified that with the need for economies of scale. Those may not exist - but look at most of the markets you interact with in your daily life and try and find the ones that don't.

I'm not aware of how regulation of competitive markets would lead to monopoly. Are you referring to "regulation" in the form of state-endorsed/controlled monopolies? Those usually exist in situations where barriers to entry and economies of scale are so high that the state is simply "getting ahead" of the inevitable monopoly (e.g. national infrastructure).

Of course, corruption could also be what you mean by "regulation" that leads to monopolies, but all of this is predicate on the absence of corruption or cartels. If that's not the case you can throw all your assumption out of the window anyway.

Re:The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice by Eddy_Viscosity2 on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @08:08AM (#46525980)
> I'm not aware of how regulation of competitive markets would lead to monopoly

Competitive markets will always tend toward monopoly because that is the state at which the highest profits can be extracted. Regulation can, in some cases, help push it a bit faster in that direction by making barriers to enter the market even more onerous and expensive thus limiting or even eliminating new competitors. This allows the existing large competitors to either continue to knock out or buy up smaller ones, and the few remaining large ones to either merge to a single entity or settle into a state of non-competitive action (effectively collusion) where the market then either is or behaves as a monopoly.

Re:The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice by throwaway132448 on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @08:25AM (#46526106)
Agreed! That sort of technical regulation needs corresponding market regulation to go with it to prevent monopoly (something we see very little of now).
Re:The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice by munksbeer on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @06:53AM (#46525346)
> I'm not aware of how regulation of competitive markets would lead to monopoly.

It depends what you mean by regulation, right?

Many industries have extremely onerous and costly regulation which creates barriers for new entrants to those markets.

Re:The mineral riches hiding under Greenland's ice by throwaway132448 on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @08:09AM (#46525988)
Yes onerous regulation can definitely hurt the competitiveness of a market, it is just another barrier to entry. The regulation would need to be specifically crafted to be a monopoly driver though: Its cost would need to significantly decrease with scale (beyond just the upfront cost that forms the barrier to entry), and outweigh the other economies of scale that might be present.