Opinion: Competition, not monopoly, is the key to economic and political freedom

A Republican acquaintance of mine once told me that he liked me until he heard me say that I was a Democrat. He then asked me if I was a “liberal.” My reply was something like this: “Well, I regard myself as a moderate Democrat — a liberal on social issues, and a fiscal conservative on economic issues, but the most basic of all principles underlying my politics and economic views is ‘countervailing power.’”

I believe in competition in capitalism. I believe in competition in politics. Which political party believes in competition, and which party believes in monopoly? Monopoly is the absence of competition. Monopoly in politics and government is called autocracy (or oligopoly or oligarchy). Autocracy in capitalism is called monopoly.

The founders believed in power sharing. They believed in the balance that comes with power sharing — among three branches, between the federal government and the state governments, and among the states. They believed in limiting the natural tendency of liberty toward excess in the exercise of both liberty and power. Balance within the competition of competing interests and liberties protects the liberty of all. Liberty for all is the common good — derived from countervailing power checks on natural tendencies toward monopolistic power.

But Republican detractors say that Democrats so thoroughly love government regulation that they actually believe that it’s OK to stifle free market capitalism and limit robust entrepreneurship with excessive regulation.

Not so. I don’t know any such Democrat within the party leadership, including such leaders as Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most believe in balance and moderation, as do I. We need the private sector in endless pursuit of profit to be the robust engine of production — without excessive government regulation by the so-called experts in government. But, we also need the right and sufficient regulation to provide the fundamental and necessary health and safety regulation that the profit sector cannot always give us. An unregulated free market place can be a health and safety nightmare.

What makes me a moderate Democrat is that I believe in the Founding Fathers’ view of the nature of man. They believed in liberty — that it is in man’s nature to be free to pursue his own interest and free to act in his own interest. They also believed that human liberty carried with it the potential for excess and harm to others in the exercise of one’s own liberty.

It was James Madison in “Federalist #51” who warned us about the excess that the Constitution was designed to limit but not prohibit:

“But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections of human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige the government to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

This is the principle so famously associated with the “Miracle at Philadelphia” in 1787 when the Constitution was created — the principle of separation of powers with structural checks and balances. This is the principle of countervailing power to protect the liberty of the many from the monopolistic liberty of the few.

Most Democratic Party leaders these days wear the mantle of free market capitalism with limits. In my view, Republican Party leaders these days, supported by their billionaire donors, favor economic monopoly without limits. My premise is simple. Free market capitalism is based on the principle of “competition” in the marketplace. Quantity and quality of goods and services, price of goods, market share and even good ideas are supposed to be governed by the principle of competition.

Countervailing power is about the sharing of power. Sharing of power, or competition, is about expanding the economic pie and the number of participants. Monopoly is about limiting the growth of the economic pie (and access to it) because it stifles or snuffs out the innovation, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship of competition. Sharing of power has a share the wealth and opportunity feature to it — the opposite of monopoly.

Monopoly is autocracy, and autocracy is monopoly. A moderate in most things, I oppose monopoly in almost all of its economic and political forms.