Return to Competition

"Competition" is an active, not a passive, noun. It applies to the entire sphere of economic activity, not merely to production, but also to trade; it implies the necessity of taking action to affect the conditions of the market in one's own favor.

The error of the nineteenth-century observers was that they restricted a wide abstraction—competition—to a narrow set of particulars, to the "passive" competition projected by their own interpretation of classical economics. As a result, they concluded that the alleged "failure" of this fictitious "passive competition" negated the entire theoretical structure of classical economics, including the demonstration of the fact that laissez-faire is the most efficient and productive of all possible economic systems. They concluded that a free market, by its nature, leads to its own destruction—and they came to the grotesque contradiction of attempting to preserve the freedom of the market by government controls, i.e., to preserve the benefits of laissez-faire by abrogating it.

  <div class="social_block">
  <div class="gplus_wrapper"><div class="g-plusone" data-href="https://aynrandlexicon.com/ # site base urllexicon/competition/8.html" data-size="medium"></div></div>
  <div class="fb-like" data-href="https://aynrandlexicon.com/ # site base urllexicon/competition/8.html" data-send="false" data-layout="button_count" data-height="20" data-width="90" data-show-faces="false"></div>
  </div>