>In a true free market, no one can obtain a harmful monopoly, unless the vast majority of human beings want the harm, in which case I can't see any sense in interfering with their free choices.
This sounds incredibly naive. Look at the most basic monopolies 101 example, Standard Oil: they kept gas prices uncompetitively high, harming customers. When a competitor opened a gas station they'd temporarily lower prices in neighbouring standard oil stations (subsidised by profits from the rest of the country), until that competitor went out of business.
You can argue that people should have paid more and bought from these competitors, but that undermines the whole economic argument for a free market (that it allows selfish actors who are interested only in their own profits to still allocate resources optimally). And no doubt you can pick some examples of standard oil being involved with government (any sufficiently large company in America does that one way or another), but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have attained their monopoly position in a completely unregulated market.
Just a side note, but Standard Oil wasn't all bad (at least not for the first 20 or so years).
They consolidated kerosene and gas production/consumption under essentially one roof, standardized rail carriages/loading docks for rapid oil dissemination and built hundreds of gas/oil pipes to aggressively reduce costs whilst providing a higher standard of oil (hence the name Standard Oil!) to the masses.
Standard Oil only became as big as it did because it provided a critical service at a lower cost. Problem was - as illustrated by my answer - is that they lost their way in the charge of profits with all the monopoly stuff you reference. This is why totally free markets don't work - they tend towards monopoly - which is my point.
I like free markets, I like innovation and I also like the government. I'm a walking host of contradictions :).
Yes, well, speaking of naive, I'm well aware of the dogmas they fill your head with in public school, so you don't need to go citing the monopoly dogma 101 stuff. What they don't tell you in those classes are the insidious ways in which harmful monopolies were beneficiaries of government privilege; you have to take the time to dig that stuff up yourself.
This sounds incredibly naive. Look at the most basic monopolies 101 example, Standard Oil: they kept gas prices uncompetitively high, harming customers. When a competitor opened a gas station they'd temporarily lower prices in neighbouring standard oil stations (subsidised by profits from the rest of the country), until that competitor went out of business.
You can argue that people should have paid more and bought from these competitors, but that undermines the whole economic argument for a free market (that it allows selfish actors who are interested only in their own profits to still allocate resources optimally). And no doubt you can pick some examples of standard oil being involved with government (any sufficiently large company in America does that one way or another), but there's no reason to believe they wouldn't have attained their monopoly position in a completely unregulated market.