 Ladies and gentlemen hunt. It's a great honor. Thanks for trying with my last name. It's a great honor to be back I missed last year unfortunately, but I have spoken almost every year here I think and interestingly I think it's the first time as an Austrian Austrian economist that I actually get a speaker about economics So let's see how that goes. Probably I'll go back to history next next year Let's start by as competitive as we economists are Let's start by taking fold with another Austrian Austrian economist Of course, I'm only at war from the shoulder of giants. You all know that But let me take some issue with the giant Friedrich August von Hayek Now poor old Hayek has got quite some kicking here already. So let me try to soften the blow a little bit He may have just been the innocent victim of a law of nature that you all know Rothbard's law If you don't know Rothbard's law, it states that people in particular economists tend to specialize the thing. They are worst at now as an even a Tiny dwarf on the shoulder of giants. Let me try to critically improve upon that law a little bit. I Think we have to generalize it a bit to make it a better fit for Hayek and I propose a generalization of Rothbard's law and That's Economists tend to get the most mainstream acclaim for the things. They are worst at I Think that's old through for almost every case. So I think it's a good to sound generalization Hayek is most famous as one of the biggest new liberals and a strong influence on the older liberals And the older liberals are known for the greatest thinkers on competition and in particular they assume That competition is the essence of a market economy Now I think that that thought is dangerously misleading Of course, you have all learned from Hans Hoppe that competition can't be a good per se It's all about who is competing about what and as Hans has put it much more eloquently than I can Frequently, it's the competition of crooks competing about how to best defraud and plunder all of us But Hayek's argument is not an ethical one. It's an epistemological one And I'll try to dissect the epistemology of competition a little bit his most famous lecture on the topic is Competition as a discovery procedure, of course, hence my tongue-in-cheek title of this talk I simply don't buy it and let's start with reading some of Hayek's thought so I don't like to read when speaking but I think it's best to decide him As his writing not in the same chronological order, but let's see Hayek writes in this or He spoke in this famous speech which was led a little written down Competition is important only because and in so far as its outcomes are unpredictable And on the whole different from those that anyone would have been able to consciously strive for and Then he gives famous examples in sporting events Examinations the awarding of government contracts or the best out of prices for poems not to mention science It won't be patently absurd to sponsor a contest if he knew in advance who the winner would be Therefore, I wish now to consider competition systematically as the procedure for discovering facts Which if the procedure did not exist would remain unknown or at least would not be used Now examples are great to understand something, but there's always a big risk with examples They can be analogies that are misleading and I think that's the case here So that's like the first slide is softest criticism. Let's look at the examples sport events Now I think if Austrian soccer fans really would be watching soccer because they wanted to find out If the team is winning they would long have given up watching soccer matches in Austria because they almost never win So I don't buy it. That's the reason in particular sport events are games So they are not means to an end. They are ends in themselves We enjoy competing with other people in games and we enjoy watching other people compete if we have ties to them If there's some shared identity if you're rooting for them, that's fun. It's a common experience. I get it I usually don't engage in it, but at least I get it. I don't get the discovery thing here in sport events And of course in games and there I think is something is leading in the analogy What is the defining feature of a game? It's rules and usually it's arbitrary rules. Everyone gets the same goal It tends to be an arbitrary goal. Of course It can be who's the fastest it can be a beauty contest and the beauty contest as a race are Two example of the same category and and the thing of course how he refers to And I think they're very very far away. What a market is about It's not about one rule that we get and I think that lends to some Misunderstanding of Hayek here now one of the harshest criticism he gets from the mainstream is even though he's such an important thing Come competition. It sounds awfully like some new new Darwinist thought and that of course is politically incorrect and impossible To think along these lines. I think there's a misunderstanding about what evolutionary theory teaches, but Hayek is at least guilty in providing some bad analogies that lead along the line now the bigger misunderstanding about Darwinism is that's about survival of the fittest in a Wrong kind of meaning in that the fittest is a kind of physical fitness That's an objective criterion and that the fittest means it's a maximization along one line Which of course is not at all what happens in evolution in evolution We have adaptations and acceptations that usually emerge in Uncovered ecological niches, so it's a process of differentiation It's not an arbitrary red race about who is the fittest the fastest the strongest the mightiest and Usually it's not a binary category. It's marginal marginally higher propensity to have surviving children or descendants And usually you get that by finding a new niche that Is that has been empty that hasn't been yet filled and I think it lends itself to an approach to Market processes, but it's not the way that with these particular examples you start thinking along And of course obviously it leads to hold the whole wrong idea of monopoly theory And I think Rothbard is based here and really figuring out what it's all about. It's this wrong conception of competition in thinking like It's very artificial that something is unique about the company They shall all be alike and compete who's the cheapest for example one arbitrary rule Which comes from materialistic thinking of course that it's all about being either the cheapest or the most profitable like Keeping the most money to yourself Which of course can be we are free to do so, but it's nothing deterministic in human action that leads us To follow that and the examples Rothbard of course gives gifts for that kind of Monopoly see because he's like if you look at an industry and you say oh the company has a large market share It's probably a monopoly. It's the same as claiming that the corner store has a monopoly at the corner It's based at Of course if you have differentiation everyone has a kind of unique monopoly We are all one person unique We offer unique products and services and we are free to discriminate as consumers and savers and So I think it's this whole line of thinking about the market as a flat earth Field for competing similar people on similar grounds along similar lines that led to this whole industry of Competition policy and competition law and competition theory And again, there's a bit high is it fold in being imprecise and somehow wrong about the actual entrepreneur What the entrepreneur is like many of his texts make it seem like an entrepreneur discover something That's already there. It's just really good at looking at things and finding something new whereas Mises I think he has the much sound understanding of it It's the promoter now, of course the term promotion hasn't aged that well now It's mainly marketing but what he meant is from the Latin Promovance someone who really brings about something new. It's not that it's there And no one has seen it usually those kind of businesses fail where you assume that I know one is seeing it it's actually changing Something and bringing it about and that gets missed in this idea of competition and now interestingly someone with practical experience and investment and Entrepreneurship has exactly came come to the same conclusion. I was Peter Thiel First in his notes on startups and then in his book zero to one That's exactly his experience. What he writes and I cite him is competition is overrated Competition may be a thing that we are taught and they do unquestioningly Maybe you compete in high school Then more tougher competition in college in grad school and then the red rays in the real world and what he says Is the really valuable businesses are actually monopoly businesses? Of course not in the sense of having a privilege But they are the last movers who create value that can be sustained over time instead of being eroded away by Competitive forces. That's what usually in the son of work. You call a mode You want to find something that you are uniquely capable of providing? And you don't just want to copy of course cop. There's nothing bad about copying It's what he calls the one-to-n kind of entrepreneurship Of course once people know what's a smartphone You can try to provide them with smartphones and then it's a kind of see who gets the largest market share But coming up with the new concept and idea is the much more important innovative process and That really hasn't or that the mental model of competition is misleading. It's like looking at the competition And usually it's not a good idea as an entrepreneur It's better to focus on what you are uniquely capable of providing and doing rather than looking at what everyone else is doing And in the symptom, I think you can see it in underdeveloped economies Let me give you the example that you see many places on the planet We see like five melon stands next to each other and now this I think wrong approach to the market would say, oh great a sixth one a sixth melon stand will be more competition and Five are better than one. So it's more market competition more markets And I think that's untrue. Usually it's nothing bad about having a fifth or sixth melon stand As an almost occupation But it's a symptom of an economy and society that differentiation hasn't happened that much And usually there are reasons for that. It's the symptoms of interventionism It's people not being able to build up something new people not being able to descend in a meaningful way And trying out something new Because differentiation of course takes time and it takes Monetary integration and useful protocols to cooperate in a more complicated differentiated structure And if you don't see that if you see like everyone doing the same or the kind of bazaar economy that we tend to see now Sometimes as tourists like everyone tries to sell you the same thing and that just compete on the price Looks like a great competition No, of course, there's a symptom of failing markets of interventionism in market of very short-term orientation Usually very high time preference who gets away with scamming the most of figuring out how you can scam the most The naive tourists that new ones will come those that been there They've learned the experience and let's wait for the next cruise ship to come and try our luck and you So I think it's this whole wrong conception about markets That gets it all wrong the other way There is another reason why competition is not always good and that has led to a lot of confusion among Economists in particular seemingly proudest economists and that's the aspect that they tend to call network goods Which I think is an inflated concept of course But there's one crucial insight from reality is a lot of our preferences of course Depend on what other people prefer as well and we learn from other people and we like to do things with other people And of course that I enjoy this conference depends very much on you enjoying the conference And it would make no sense whatsoever that each of one would start now competing With our hundred property and freedom societies here and everyone enjoying being the king like Hans Because of course there's a natural monopoly in being Hans-Hermann Hoppe So it's it's no way an improvement to see that as a kind of competition emerging Of course a conference is a network good in that sense But I think it's an inflated term for something that should be obvious for anyone and it leads to things like Looking at Facebook and claiming oh Everyone has to be in Facebook in order for it to be a valuable service. So it must be a public utility It's a natural monopoly and whatever kind of term you want to invent to publish your economics paper and What actually happens? I think Is that way it's like when they the least cool and the most idiotic people China Facebook it's like oh everyone else is already there And who are the least cool most idiotic people economists sometimes so when the economists enter Facebook It's like oh everyone is already there and they don't see that they enter it exactly at the moment in history When Facebook is losing market share because your parents are already already in Facebook. It sucks Oh economists are already on Facebook. It sucks so much and so hard And then of course you go on so you see it as a problem Exactly at the moment when it disappears as a problem It's never been a problem to begin with and I think it comes from this lack of really like Real experience and understanding what it's about why some preferences are Shared references and why there's a lot of intersubjective coordination along our preferences and I think some Networks are more important than others and I consider even Catalaxy what Mises and Hayek called extended order of cooperation the market Obviously is a network phenomenon. So I I don't think it makes much sense and there's this argument like going around Oh, we can't be sure that socialism in every possible flavor. We can imagine will fail Maybe it hasn't been tried hard enough Let's compete with the market economy and try again and again and again And somehow we then can discover finally why the market is maybe superior or not And I think it's the same fallacy. It's like you won't improve You won't find anything out anything by separating a network that has to be a network By like cutting off people usually by coercion from this network claiming that oh I have to figure out if it won't work better So this as crazy as like have a government instituted many of a thousand different Facebooks that are government mandated for every preference and every kind of filter bubble gets its own protected space and safe space To be in so I think you see there's lots of Potentially very misleading ways you can go from very simple examples, which are wrong and wrong analogies And I think it's worse than that. It's not just a scientific misconception It's actually a cover-up. It has turned into a cover-up more than discoveries There's nothing that we can really find out by pursuing that line of thought I think it has become a cover-up story and let me tell you why that's the case If we use let's start again with the simplest thing you look at a sports event and It's a great story. It's a great cover story What our sports event the cover story for for someone to organize it you need organized? Oh great That means we need committees of people organizing things. Oh great. That means we need functionaries But I mean someone has to decide on the rule. How do you define a woman in women's sport? you need really like Certified functionaries being able to figure out the rules that you're all competing without that there won't be a competition So the whole idea of organized Competition of course lends itself to a class of functionaries that are now competition experts and competition functionaries trying to figure out how to better compete And even worse now the next example or third example was like prices awards handing out prices and Now I think There's there's a gaping floor here, of course Hayek was the recipient of such a price and I'd find it quite ridiculous to assume that like People were looking All around the world who is the best economists to find and then it was a miraculous discovery And they found Hayek and they gave him the price and it was just a discovery process now not saying not claiming that that I was a shill or anything But I think it makes much more sense to look into prices and what they may be a cover-up for And more generally the big question is of course who pays for the price who hands out the price and and you can't just be That formalistic as Hayek sometimes is just looking at the formal part of something Gido talked about that the legal structures the formal structure and look look at the intent of it And of course it feels great handing out prices. That's the good thing about philanthropy Everyone loves that everyone wants to be Bill Gates and handing out millions and billions to people and get all the acclaim So by handing out prices I think the biggest goal that you reach as a Functionary is you got to feel like a Renaissance patron And you get to patronize scientists and poets and literates and you can bask in Baccalaureate of all the people you give prices to and Of course, let's look at the Nobel Prize, which quite obviously a cover-up This fake price and and to admit I mean Hayek was really one giving the best acceptance speech yet It was an acceptance speech of I think it's a better idea to hand out that price Which I think is the best way to Deal with receiving a price like that Why did he get the price now? Of course some conspiracy theories this all satire with all the head that is claim Also conspiracy. I think it makes much more sense to see like who was funding the price the Swedish central bank What is their most likely aim to? institutionalize economics as a scientific Discipline akin to physics and engineering with all the prestige it comes along and you if you read what Nobel Wrote about the price you can see him are turning in the grave. That's exactly what he did Well, he would never have agreed to handing out prices to social scientists because I mean he rightfully Was very about their methodological soundness because most really are pseudo scientists and are just abusing the cover of science for Very worldly interests So I think that's the main intention of the price Why did Hayek get it? I think it makes best sense to look at who else got it gonna Murdoel the welfare state or the Teletarian from Sweden and at the time it seemed like a very extreme guide to receive a Nobel Prize So it makes a lot of sense if you need a cover-up story to be a very neutral body Handing out prices of course never to extremists as there's no what prices are for You got to find someone from the other part of the spectrum to show how neutral you are how it's all about the science Of course and the facts would speak for themselves and that stuff we got a trust in So I think it's it's much more likely to think along these ways Of course, you can consider that a conspiracy theory But then I mean let's entertain the other thought and I think it's absurd like Assuming that there was a worldwide search for the most peaceful guy on the planet and Miraculously, they discovered this immaculate person of color in Washington DC with the audacity to hope Doesn't make sense a discovery procedure. It's rather looks like a cover-up procedure, right? so I think this example really doesn't hold that well and Of course, what's the most important cover-up story and that's the basis of how all the liberalism is perceived as competition as a rationale for interventionism as always Stay looking for reasons to intervene someplace and it's also brought Oh, we should have a company there that's doing that and compete there And why don't we have someone competing in that field? It's it's this whole full process Of propping up something of course it lends itself to infant industry Argument of favoritism of every kind and function is thinking about who should compete in which industry and which field and it's really ridiculous And that of course explains why the famous neoliberals like Walter Liebman one of the originators of the term in his agenda of liberalism he He proposed measures such as Tristic inheritance taxes steeply graduated income taxes and the financing of public work projects and he cited approvingly Keynes Of course everything to increase competition Because that's apparently what markets are all about And I'd say it's a flawed story Competition bring more business. That's a very Keynesian thought in itself like functionaries politician thinking about more business That's Keynesianism in its essence someone thinking about more business who's living of course of the results of that business and just wants to Plunder the cattle he's farming essentially But Hayek was right on one thing on in this particular speech So he realized something and I think that's quite important when you look for the more we need more competition That's why we do economic policies that lead to more business because more business is great And and the merchants will be forever thankful for our great foresighted policies Hayek observes that the high growth rate is more a sign of bad policies in the past than of good policies in the present Why is that the case? Of course You suddenly have quite growth rates usually means catch-up growth This means you weren't able to do the most simple things like having a melon stand and then of course once you are Allowed to sell on the market. Oh, you'll have suddenly five and ten melon stands and it's a great thing But it's not like oh, we got more business by Have having such a competitive policies is just all the interventionism and flawed and blundering in the past That's have led to all this upside potential for growth and more business and And Well, of course politicians arguing for more competition. I mean how ridiculous can you get it's like? prostitutes arguing for more virginity Sorry That analogy, but they are good analogies and they're bad analogies, of course So obviously competition policies in oxymoron What is there less competitive than politics? It's exactly based on the idea There's no one should compete that it should be model monopoly providers So it's really ridiculous if you look at it and of course it explains a lot of that Mainstream economics models like the perfect Competition all that sounds great. Yeah, that's gonna have perfect competition, which of course an illusion It's the equilibrium model. That's called perfect competition. What does perfect competition mean? No change no entrepreneurship No money by everything. That's interesting about economics. You cut it off and you call it perfect competition I will call it castrated economics Or or maybe to have a fancy term. It's not catalectics. It's castrolactics Why is castration I mean it's the sign of the slave of the cattle that you're farming and I think that's what it's about Actually that kind of oh, we got to have more business And that's how you it arrive at these thoughts Of course, it all is a cover-up to overlook the essence the real essence of the market And it's consumer and saver sovereignty Sovereignty of people to say no to being castrated branded as cattle or whatever You would say it's no determinism We are all free to discriminate as sovereign consumers or savers and not follow deterministically and go for the cheapest offer or The same offer for everyone that will Eventually end up like a competition competition end result is of course the one the best company gets all the Consumers and then of course that then socialism wouldn't look that extreme because it's already happened That was the Marxist idea and of course is very closely aligned to the kind of thought the competition means like one big fish Eating all the other fish because one company will remain and survive on the planet and then we just have to change The the stockholders which just move it on to everyone Yeah, that's like the idea how without wire lens you'd have socialism of course based on a pleasure thinking And no basis in reality What else is it a cover-up? Of course the whole distorted market structure that we are living in the green new deals The competition for subsidies That's all competition. Of course. We are not socialists. Of course. We're not planning anything. We are offering market incentives And then you've got to compete like flooring peanuts to the monkeys come up now with some green technology you guys I'm throwing out the peanuts Compete for it. And that's our market economy in the European Union throwing out peanuts to get a green Economy job course we mean much more business for every one of you Consumers don't go for it. Then we have all the subsidies here and all the credit You can ask for and unfortunately it really In Austria I experienced a daily a startup Sometimes really just means competing for subsidies is figuring out how to fill out the forms to compete for subsidies Sometimes they are called prices. Sometimes they are preferred credit But it's a very artificial and interventionist thing this kind of competing for the price From the emperor or no doubt the bureaucracy that's handing it out and another idea It leads to is of course the world is flat Level playing field of globalism. It's like competition as a level playing field. How crazy can you be? The reality of course is a rocked landscape and that's a great thing about a market and it's differentiation It has to be a rocked landscape where we are free to say no and that's where you have our niches and not a one-size-fits-all solution Where the one big globalist? conglomerate now gets it to give it out to everyone and you don't even pay it for free Because it's such such great scaling solution and epistemologically It leads or it's a sign of nihilism. I think and you hear it a lot like let the market decide Of course there's something good about it, but I think something dangerously misleading It can be a sign of relativism a sign of nihilism. I'm saying I have no clue Let's not argue about it. Let's just let the market decide if socialism is better than capitalism And I would warn against this kind of relativism. Of course the good thing about let the market decide is No one should have the power to impose anything Anything, but I think we have a duty to be honest and saying when we think that something is stupid Fraud looks fraudulent or looks like a scam Or it's only there because of subsidies and so on and it's not a sustainable business model I think there's a moral duty to call out those Competitors and not just say let the market decide It So I Mean I mentioned the phrase like don't argue build and there's something great about it Of course, we are all tired of the political bickering, but the don't argue build Get something entirely wrong and I recommend those people using the line to read Hans Hoppe The real argumentation ethics and figure out it can't be the opposite Can't be don't argue but build can be don't just argue maybe But building necessitates of course to use resources in a different way Then they have been used without that you can't build It necessitates to have a different idea about what the world should look like and how the resources should be Employed and of course, that's the essence of argumentation if I use my vocal chords to express a different idea dissenting idea. It's usually just a step before Using other resources to express different ideas about how things should go and should work out So it can't be the opposite and real building always necessitates a kind of dissent And that's why this kind of nihilism is like oh, let's not argue because you could hurt the feelings of that person there Let's all agree on everything I I think that's that's like the level playing field of idiots where no one disagrees and everyone goes along It's it's not even worth discussing. It's not even worth arguing because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all ideas don't matter it's just a Matter of who's more successful in the competition and I think that's the most dangerously misleading idea here Let me I think I have a little bit more time because quite a spacious speaking slot I'll try to give you some some insights from an industry. I've been watching for quite a while I Happened about it quite early on and I've Be become a bit of an industry inside I'd say and that's the crypto field the crypto currency sector and What I've seen as a lot of This narrative competition as a cover-up story and let me explain how that happens now Usually if you say Let the market decide and the new and competition is great and more competition is better Usually you mean that the new entrant on the market is great because it's new That's what you mean by if you have a new company you you don't want to say okay I don't think it's a good idea. Let's just say oh, it's new. It must be that's great That's more competition and I think of course that you have like intrinsically kind of progressivism built in And I don't think that's usually true If you look at something and you realize oh crypto currency, I've never heard about it. It's entirely new That's fantastic. I got to be early It's a very very misleading approach to investing and it usually will go wrong because if it's so new to you it means you have no clue Because most innovation is not an invention most innovation is to your recombination of things So if it's really new to you you have missed decades of Inventions and technological progress and Bitcoin the first contender of course was a recombination of fairly old inventions There was nothing entirely new about it if it was all new to you it meant you had no clue And of course for some it was a very great Horristic which usually doesn't work but those who entered Bitcoin because they thought oh, it's new. I have no clue It must be something great. I can be early. They lost everything usually Because then of course something else that's newer comes along and since Bitcoin 23,000 Newer and China crypto currencies have come along so 23,000 possibilities to be early again The average expected value of course is largely negative. I'm not saying the old-world Projects of course there's a lot of experimentation and that's what's invention is about but why are they? Stole the script of currency and I think one of the reasons is competition as a cover-up story and even here Hayek has Contributed a misleading thought that it's one of his most famous booklets or papers to denationalization of money Now he was brilliant in the inside that you've got to separate the money and the state brilliant inside very important And I really like the paper because it's very unusual for an economist It's like not him saying how the work should be and because he understands everything It's like he's thinking if I was an entrepreneur. How would I do it? That's wonderful. I think it was mostly wrong his paper, but for all for the right reasons Still of course, why is he wrong? And I think there's something about technological How technological innovation process works? Hayek thought that international businesses will become impossible to the fiat monies Because you have the currency risk And then of course he thought there's a problem You've got to have a competition for a solution And for maybe a company will come up with a right way to offer something better But what he's looking here is a protocol Innovation and it usually does not happen that way that it's a start of the figures out a new protocol And then got to reap all the benefits by becoming a unicorn That's not how new technologies usually into the markets Usually the early start of the new technology don't get to reap the benefits of the introduction of the new technology That's a harsh lesson to take There's nothing bad in being start-up and trying out something new of course, but it's not how innovation usually works So it's not one company offering a one-size-feets-all solution usually it's more of a discovery process and What was the solution it was of course derivatives and hedging the whole financialization Which you can say is a market solution to an interventionist problem But of course this kind of competition that came up with a solution to a problem created by interventionism Is a great cover-up for the financialization and the beneficiaries of the intervention and the monetary distortions in the first place so the comic it has become a great story What was that the actual? Potentially on the premier solution And it works in a sense, but it's a very unjust distribution of The premiums of the country on effect and so on So it's an early side of distortion if you have monetary distortion You can't count on a competition it gets even worse because of course you don't have a level playing field You can talk all the much about a level playing field a new Horistic and the new structure enters and that's what we see in venture capital and venture formation Once you realize that of course that the sound is kind of liquidity You want to go for is real productivity like you solve a problem for consumers the liking it The exchanging value in return. That's great. That's the sound basis that what we like about markets But once you have a distorted monetary structure, of course gradually without people realizing it this whole protocol gets distorted and The liquidity that becomes important may be exit liquidity like just finding new retail investors Never mind if there's never any sustainable productivity never mind if there's no real problem. You're going to solve Let's just figure out who are the idiots to sell our venture to or let's figure out how to get How else get liquidity a new credit line a new investor a new subsidy And so on and so on so of course once that kind of liquidity that interventionist liquidity becomes Overwhelming you can't claim that the competition for liquidity and the discipline of the market really leads to a reading out of Companies wasting resources. No, it can enhance and increase the amount of companies competing about new ways to waste our resources and that's actually What's happening? I think I think a large part not all of those a large part of those 23,000 Cryptocurrency are actually nothing but regulatory arbitrage to compete for retail liquidity Posted on the thing that people want to save of course and they figured out Wow big car was a big story And if I missed it, I try to find find something where I can be early again And you have the token instrument That's a kind of pseudo equity without having any claim to any dividends or any claim in any share of the business Many of these projects are really sound ways to try to experiment with new technology But they are in the different in the wrong sectors like people being pushed into speculation By the interventionism is destroying the monetary protocol that leads to an inflated need for new And the shiny In order to find someone else who hasn't heard about it that you can exit to and liquidate it And of course with interest rate manipulation It's ever worse because it's ever further in the future where the potential Productivity may lie and you have ever larger promises of utopian solutions Which usually happen don't happen that way technology usually doesn't happen that way that one Enterprise offers a protocol innovation that people understand immediately and then pay money for Usually it's a sector-wide change where Companies are riding waves of adoption and helping people preach the gap to a new technology and helping figure out How you can use that? And so on and of course money Has the essential network effect where more competition is not a good per se and let me side hands hoppe who in 1990 Already wrote the notion of competition between monies as a contradiction in object Strictly speaking a monetary system with rival monies of freely fluctuating exchange rate is still a system partial barter riddled with the problem of requiring double coincidences of wants in order for some exchanges to take place the Existence of such a system is Dysfunctional of the very purpose of money competitive monies are not the outcome of free market actions But are invariably the result of coercion of government-imposed obstacles placed in the path of rational economic conduct So I think that's absolutely true. It was a very prophetic remark I think in correcting some of high-ex approaches to competition which Goes a bit along the line that Rothbard already tried to correct That competition in the good sense can only be about access To the market privileged access and the impossibility to access a new market or the impossibility to say no To a provider. That's the real crucial dangerous kind of monopoly But it doesn't tell us anything about how a market should be structures and how many companies should be in which arbitrary industry That's really very very misleading Now let me conclude. I I think it's a flawed way to look at markets This way is a globalized level playing field. I I think it's This idea which has been popularized a bit in the US that there is a sucker born every minute And now we got to compete to kick the sucker into our goal and monetize him as quickly as possible because someone else We'll be there for the new sucker. So you call it like a sucker sucker. They all competing try to get the new sucker emerging and I Think that's the reasons what that's one of the reason why big corporations are becoming woke and It's the reason they don't want to miss out on any sucker no matter what is his her or their pronoun They just got to catch every sucker possible and that's his flawed idea of competition It's like one-size-fits-all thing for global audiences that of course are very colorful and diverse But of course just the diversity that's breached by certain gatekeepers That you orient yourself. So I think there's an intrinsic reason that I don't think it's that ideological it's really about not losing any kind of sucker you could milk for your flawed business idea in a distorted market and I'm happy to agree with keto that The essence of the problem is a wrong dichotomy as the usual dichotomy between the market the competitive market and Society and the state on the other side and it's like my competition is Disimportant field. That's of course is the wrong line We all learn from Rothbard what the real line is there's coercion on the one side That's the market in society on the other side And there's no reason to believe that there's more competitiveness in the non-corrosive sector actually my anecdotal experience Is all the other way around? Who are the more the most petty? Competitive people they are in bureaucracies They're in government funding universities and I who gets to teach which hours on which curriculum he gets to get what certificate and what price It's careerists. That's the kind of competition. Why career comes from Carlos. That's the chariot in the race That's exactly that. It's an arbitrary game a rule Someone has told you that you've got to make most money or got to have most acclaim or whatever And then you're racing along a thing. Oh, you're very competitive in doing that And then my experience is you find that kind of career is usually in the distorted Interventionist coercive structures and it's really crazy to think that it's like when when scientists compete for third party Grants, that's the market. It's like a third party grants. Usually our government subsidies prices Credit you name it, but if they cooperate, oh, that's a market failure because cooperation can only happen In this fear of government where they openly share their ideas where they work on open source projects, for example Now that's crazy and in particular in this industry I'm a bit aware of the technological change mostly happens in the open source parties like people intrinsically Motivated to try out something new having leisure to not compete That's actually one of the essences of invention having leisure not to be forced to run along with everyone else in a stupid red race Because you are free to dissent you are free to say no you're free to discriminate and cooperate with anyone you like and Not just take any sucker as a customer because that's Opposedly supposedly how the market is working. Thank you for your patience