The myth of capitalism in the United States is that there is still competition. In a rare attempt to reach readers across the political spectrum, Tepper and Hearn argue that competition, one of the cornerstones of the free market, is in death throes, and that the lack of economic freedom will inevitably bleed into politics.

Most definitions of capitalism make mention of private property and competition. Karl Marx vehemently opposed private property, but the collapse of Communism’s mainstays at the end of the 20th century bolstered the appeal and importance of protecting private ownership.

The aspect of capitalism that has proven more contentious is competition.

 Capitalism is unparalleled in its ability to lift people out of poverty. But what we call “capitalism” in the United States is hardly capitalism at all. In the absence of competitive markets, it’s become what some economists call “ersatz capitalism,” a cheap perverted form of capitalism. Market conditions have become highly uncompetitive as industries become gathered into the hands of just a few players. For almost half a century, market concentration has become condensed to a toxic degree. For example:

-In the beer industry, two corporations run 90 percent of the beer brands Americans buy.

-Four airlines rule the skies, and these companies frequently dominate the offerings at many major US airports, with one or two monopolizing or duopolizing slots at numerous hubs.

-Half the nation’s banking assets run through only five banks.

-Three out of four U.S. households have only one option for high-speed internet services.

-In many states, health insurance companies enjoy duopolies or near-monopolies.

-If several mergers go through as planned, just three corporations will have cornered 70 percent of the global pesticide market.

-Apple and Google enjoy a duopoly in the mobile app market.

-Facebook and Google have a duopoly in online advertising.

Milton Friedman, the face of the Chicago School of Economics, wrote a book called Free to Choose. Ideally, that would be an apt descriptor of the societal state of affairs, but there is little to no freedom to choose when there are only one or two options. Friedman accurately saw economic freedom as a prerequisite for political freedom. This means that warped economics lead to warped politics. 

The right and left can agree that there’s something rotten at play, even if they can’t agree on what the cause is. They both miss the mark when they say they want to preserve or rein in “unfettered, competitive free market forces.” Preserving the status quo is not a preservation of capitalism. The problem runs deeper than the oppressive, big business, corrupt CEO diatribe. Neither is capitalism inherently flawed or a logical contradiction, as Thomas Piketty maintains. The problem is not merely that businesses are big, but how they’ve gotten big: They’ve gotten big through mergers that have eliminated choice for consumers, and allowed companies to set exorbitant prices in the absence of competition. Many of these monopolies and oligopolies schmooze with lawmakers and regulators so that laws and regulations will ensure business as usual and make the cost of entry into their markets prohibitive for young startups. 

The deterioration of competition has hurt capitalism and is harming our political order. Capitalism is not the problem, but its bastardization—to the ruin of competition—sure is. G.K. Chesterton rightly observed that, “too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few.”

Warren Buffett is considered by many to be the embodiment of capitalism itself. He’s been one of the most successful investors in the United States and is one of the wealthiest people in the world. Ironically, he hates competition; competition for Buffett is someone coming along and trying to do it better, taking money away from the guy who had the good idea first. “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,” he has said.

Warren Buffett is kind of like Steph Curry: He takes shots far enough away from the fray so that they’re not challenged. Scoring is much easier when there’s no competition.

Peter Thiel is another example of a businessman who hates competition. Thiel is quintessential Silicon Valley stock. He’s the founder of PayPal and quite different from Buffett in many regards. What they do have in common is aversion to competition. Peter Thiel argues in his book Zero to One that capitalism and competition are incompatible. Instead of entering and competing in a market, Thiel advocates for creating an entirely new service or market and making it a monopoly. Competition is now passé.

Many MBAs now take pages out of Buffett’s and Thiel’s books, teaching the same approach to investment, the efficacy of mergers, and how best to keep competitors out of your industry. There’s an ocean of business books that explain the different kinds of “moats” that prevent outsiders from seizing part of the kingdom. Students are taught to bet like Buffet, and put money on monopolies.

When most people hear “robber barons,” they think of tycoons from the turn of the 19th century”: corpulent, domineering men donning top hats and holding cigars. But the term “robber baron” extends back to medieval Germany, where nobles, the Rauberitter, charged tolls for anyone looking to cross their lands. This practice forced a transfer of money from the commoner to the lords of the land. The roads were often in disrepair and the money garnered through tolls rarely went toward their repair. Americans pay similar tolls in order to continue going about their lives. They pay out to a handful of companies that have little to no competition.

For medication, you’ll probably go to Walgreens or CVS. If you need a phone, you’ll likely end up with an iPhone or Android. If you’re looking for an agency to provide medical coverage, you’ll likely have just a few options per state.

Today, there are monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies in every major industry. High-speed internet, computer operating systems, social networks, search advertising, milk, railroads, microprocessors, and funeral homes are monopolies—either global or local. Mastercard and Visa form a payment system duopoly. Phone operating systems, online advertising, kidney dialysis, and eyeglasses are duopolies as well. Another duopoly that most people don’t speak of as such is the political duopoly controlled by Republicans and Democrats. Credit reporting bureaus, tax prep services, airlines, phone companies, banks, health insurance, drug wholesalers, meat and poultry industries, agriculture, media, and title insurance are all oligopolies.

If you go to the grocery store, you might think that you are spoiled for options, but the variety is often a veneer. Most brands fall under a larger umbrella, which is then under an even larger umbrella company. It’s the nature of mergers and acquisitions. It harms business because so-called “captains” in each food category have reserved spots on supermarket shelves, and lesser-known brands that attempt to contend have a very slim shot at getting their products on the shelves—let alone keeping them on the shelves. The lack of competition also harms consumers who pay higher prices. Companies can price items higher without fear of competitors offering comparable products at more affordable, reasonable prices. In fact, what often happens is a kind of tacit collusion between companies within an industry. Companies will watch the dominant player in an industry and copy its movements: If the alpha company hikes its prices, the rest will follow suit.

Cancer is not difficult to eradicate. If it’s in a beaker or Petri dish, there are all kinds of chemicals that will obliterate it. The difficulty is killing cancers when they are ensconced in a person’s vital organs. How do you eliminate the unwelcomed mass without harming the rest of the body?

One of the keys to successfully contending with cancer and preserving human life is “selective toxicity.” Treatments based in this principle expose the patient to drugs that are sufficiently poisonous to kill the cancer without killing the host. This principle is the foundation of chemotherapy. The most common way that chemotherapy attacks cancer is through disrupting its genetic structure. Organisms usually split their energy reserves between growth and repair. Cancers are singular in the sense that they allocate their energy to growth and none to repair. So when chemotherapy destroys the DNA strands in cancer, the cancer cells will continue attempting to replicate cells with faulty encoding rather than repairing them. These cells inevitably die, and that is how the battle against cancer is slowly won.

The process of chemotherapy helps us better understand the differences between established businesses and new businesses, and the effects that regulations have on each. Monopolies, duopolies, and oligopolies view business upstarts as cancerous invaders to an industry. But like chemotherapy, regulations are toxic to new business growth. A well-established business might be equipped with surplus capital, a team of antitrust lawyers, and lobbyists. They can repair themselves when the government insists on another round of chemo. But young companies still struggling to find their footing are far less likely to be able to repair themselves after all the tariffs, licenses, and quotas they are expected to comply with.

Regulations are well-intentioned attempts at avoiding corruption, reining in big businesses, and ensuring quality, but they usually benefit big companies and often bury young companies. New businesses often can’t handle the searing pain of chemotherapeutic regulations because they halt growth, raise entry barriers, and remove ambitious contenders that would have the best shot at competing, which would aid the consumer by lowering prices. It would also aid workers because wages would inevitably rise: More businesses mean employers compete with each other to find the best workers. They do this by offering to pay more.

Regulations make it difficult for new growth to take hold, which means monopolies continue uncontested. As the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek points out, a private monopoly’s days are numbered. It won’t be a monopoly for long without the government’s support. Only government can kill the innovations and entrepreneurship that naturally bubble up in a truly competitive free market.

Unfortunately, the relationships between monopolies and government are extremely profitable business in and of themselves. It is no coincidence that there is a revolving door between top brass in the federal government and Goldman Sachs, or between the federal government’s personnel and Monsanto’s. Both politicians and big businesses are disingenuous when they talk about looking out for the little guy with regulations that “even the playing field.” All these regulations do is disempower the little guys, ruin innovation, disincentivize startups, and remove potential contenders who could cut in on a lucrative partnership between the government and their pet-monopolies.  

Many of the regulatory efforts promote inequality rather than an even playing field; if the inequality continues to be severe, people will not tolerate it forever.

The consequences of increasingly concentrated economic power are well-documented: the erosion of diversity and localism, fewer start-ups and jobs, far fewer horses to bet on in the stock market, decreased productivity, higher prices, lower wages, and exacerbated income inequalities.

As the prolific historian Will Durant observed, a society flirts with its own implosion when it allows inequality to become too pronounced. A common dynamic in declining societies is “a cultured minority” and an “unfortunate majority.”

In many ways, San Francisco shows us what the US economy is like on a smaller scale: There is an incredibly wealthy cadre tucked into the Silicon Valley and other pockets of the city, and a growing majority of people lagging behind. The middle class is shrinking and becoming a new impoverished class. The city has the most pronounced inequalities in the most unequal state. The average 1 percenter makes over $3 million annually—44 times as much as the mean income of the city’s 99 percent.

The Silicon Valley continues to boast big gains, but San Francisco is bleeding jobs. Job growth is slowing down. Finding affordable housing is a challenge, especially near places of business. There’s growing unrest in the city, with protests at San Francisco’s airport and at Twitter. More people left the Bay area in 2016 than had left in any year since 2006.

One of Amazon’s earliest investors, now cozily perched in the .01 percent, recently wrote an open letter to “My Fellow Zillionaires,” subtitled “The Pitchforks Are Coming…for Us Plutocrats.” In his letter, he reminds his target audience that there has never been a time in history where such rapidly rising inequality didn’t lead to violent unrest or a police state.

He did not present this as a prophecy, but a warning and a rallying of the ultra-wealthy to do something about inequality. Inequality is not the root, but the fruit of a lack of genuine competition. True capitalism brings freedom, but the imposter ersatz capitalism of our time is enslaving us. It’s time to fight for antitrust reform once again. It’s time to stop viewing capitalism’s main role as efficiency maximization. It’s time to realize that it’s not big business, but monopolies, that are ruining competition in our society. It’s time to halt mergers that lead to more monopolies. It’s time to break up local monopolies that soak the already cash-strapped consumers. It’s time to create regulations that serve society instead of increasing the cost of entry into industries. It’s time to simplify regulation. It’s time to stop the revolving door between monopolists and politicians. It’s time to start rejecting extensions for copyrights and patents that prevent competition indefinitely. It’s time for workers at companies to be given stock in their companies, so they can share ownership of those companies.

As an individual, do your best to avoid supporting monopolies and duopolies. Steer clear of internet titans. Their services might be free, but you and your data are what they’re after. Urge your politicians to promote competition and remove impediments.

Competition is dying, but it isn’t dead. Waking up to the dangers monopolies pose to economic and political freedom is the first step toward its preservation.