The world isn't that simple and by the way, monopoly is a natural outcome in a free market system exactly because it doesn't always work. It breaks down, that's why we regulate it. The only place the free market actually works is in libertarians imaginations because they think Atlas Shrugged somehow reflects reality.

You do live in a strange world very distant from the one that most of us readers of Hacker News lives in.

Name me one real monopoly that isn't enforced through "social engineering". A free market may have ocasional dominant market leaders like IBM and MS in their time and Google today. None of them are or were monopolies as better technologies and startups will always (lets repeat that word ALWAYS) come around as long as they are allowed.

True monopolies like the telecoms monopolies in many countries are not outcomes of free markets, but rather more or less corrupt deals between governments and a little group of businesses. Most often the monopoly is argued as a way to protect the consumer.

The free market works wonderfully in many different places in the world and in many different aspects of our daily life. Banking, telecoms and health care are not examples of this as they are heavily regulated. Most of us readers of hacker news are doing what we are doing because of the wonders of the free market.

If not we would be marching fists held up high to Washington demanding the creation of the National Department of Internet Services, to give us lifelong employment. Yet we aren't doing that. The free market works great even though our chosen field has been hit by many different bubbles and failures. The market has picked right up with no real government interference (except for financial and gaming fields) and will continue to improve.

Spare me the old marxist marching chants (I should know what they sound like as I used to be one).

No, I live in the real world where unrestrained free trade is bad because people seeking profit are not inherently good when they acquire too much power. See Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller and some history about why we started trust busting in the first place.

Your view that the free market works wonderfully if left alone is simply naive. The real world is simply more complex than that.

In fact, your belief that there even is such a thing as a free market is naive and ignores the very real fact that corruption is inevitable and businesses seek out regulation to protect themselves from competitors destroying the very free market they so claim to love. Any truly free market is simply a temporary state of existence destined to die as soon as corruption takes hold, which it always does.

You yourself just answered why regulation can't ever work correctly: "The real world is simply more complex than that."

As a programmer you should know that extremely complex systems like the world can not ever be managed by a small group of super clever beings.

This has been the fallacy of each and every of "I'm smart you're not, I'll run things" philosophies originally invented by Plato and perfected by Marx.

The world is a complex system managed by 6 billion autonomous beings. Together these 6 billion autonomous beings for an extremely smart mega intelligence. While you, I and our "leaders" may be smarter than the vast majority of these individuals. Together though is another story.

I agree with your point about corruption as long as we assume the presence of a regulating entity. Corruption is essentially the markets way of calculating a price on overcoming social engineering.

But without regulators in the first place it would not exist and would simply be just other transaction between two or more parties.