 get priority and that's why I'm jumping to this question. Plus it's on topic. Did the classical economists think they were helping capitalism with their perfect competition theory because they made it seem altruistic and like it would solve the monopoly problem? No, I think they had, first of all, utilitarianism in a sense is baked into the way they do economics. There was nobody who questioned that. It's just baked into the formulas. Except for the Austrians who were developing at the same time in parallel to the neoclassical economists and the Austrians were combating the neoclassicals. But I don't think they were helping capitalism. They were trying to describe capitalism and they were trying to come up with mathematical models and trying to explain capitalism. And they came up with their notions of marginal utility which the Austrians came up with in parallel but used properly. The neoclassicals used it to undermine capitalism. That's weird. Why did my phone do that? So I don't think it was, I don't think they had a sense of morality or altruism. I think that, again, they had utilitarianism baked in and this is where, if you will, the math led them and they were very driven by math. They were very driven by trying to understand what they were seeing around. And it is true that if you produce an innovation and people then copy you and they compete with you, they drive, the tendency is to drive profit margins down. Ultimately, if you get to perfect competition, zero. But there's no question. Samsung drives Apple's profits down and if you had 20 competitors, they would drive the profits down even more. So what they're observing in a fundamental sense is a true phenomenon. But they are now, in order to simplify it, in order to make it understandable, in order to make it mathematically possible. They have to make certain assumptions like perfect information, perfect knowledge, everybody instantaneous, everything's instantaneous. They simplify these things and you see that in economics all the time. And then they start taking and when they first do it, they know, oh, this is just simplification, all else held constant kind of thing, but we know nothing's held constant. We know these are just simplifications. But then it becomes, well, this is perfect. This is perfect competition. So now it becomes the standard and they forget all the caveats they put on it when they created these ideas. And then it starts serving a political purpose and quite political purpose then they've lost. If you think about it, antitrust laws, which fad off of this view of monopolies, didn't really need the economist support. They were primarily driven by an idea of monopolies abusing their power. It didn't need a mathematical proof, although it got it from the neoclassicals and the neoclassicals then went in and you can see economists working with lawyers to try to better define monopolies and how they should be broken up and when you see economists all the time participating in this work of what is the optimal structure as if Mises never wrote, as if Hayek never wrote about the inability of central panacea to determine those things and about the beauty of markets and how markets sift through these problems and without the idea of substitution products, the idea that you're not always competing with whom you think you're competing. My favorite example is again, a standard oil. Who ultimately competed standard oil out of the business? Well, it was Edison because the business of standard oil was in in the 1870s was lighting and it's electricity that competed them out of the business of lighting. But nobody could see that. And that's the point Austrian economists make is you can't see the competition. And of course, what would have happened if standard oil had raised prices and lowered quality? Competition would have risen. So you're seeing a universe in which they drop prices and increase quality in order to prevent competition from rising, but the potential competition is always there and the potential competition is placing real, real influence, real influence. Even though it's not real, it's just potential. It's creating real influence on the behavior of actual entrepreneurs. And then of course, it's an ignorance of what motivates entrepreneurs and what motivates entrepreneurs is not just maximizing short-term profit. It's looking into the long-term and figuring out how to best use the particular product that they have and sometimes giving it away for free is the best use of the product because then you discover new ways in which to monetize it. Think about again, Facebook didn't know why it was gonna make money early on, had no idea. It just gave away a product for free, built up an audience based on that. And then over time, figured out how to monetize it. There's even that term monetize it, how to monetize it. And but it still gives it away for free. It's same in a sense as Google. I don't know the Google when it first came out with its algorithm and offered it free to all of us in a search engine, understood the way it would make money ultimately and where it would dominate the market ultimately is in search. I don't know at what phase in the development but that's the beauty of markets. That's the beauty of entrepreneurship is these things evolve, these understandings evolve, these and partially it's competitive pressures that bring about, partially it's just the genius of entrepreneurs that they learn as they create. That is the creating, the creative process is a process of learning. The creative process is a process of learning. And you don't have all the answers before you start. You don't know what'll work and what won't work. You don't know how you'll monetize your success. You have to let it work out. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, whims or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist, the world. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes, that should be at least a hundred. I figure at least a hundred of you actually like the show. 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