{"id":195,"date":"2026-05-04T10:52:33","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T14:52:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/people.bsu.edu\/econbriefs\/?p=195"},"modified":"2026-05-04T10:52:33","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T14:52:33","slug":"creative-destruction-vs-monopoly-by-dr-cecil-bohanon-and-dr-john-horowitz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.bsu.edu\/econbriefs\/2026\/05\/04\/creative-destruction-vs-monopoly-by-dr-cecil-bohanon-and-dr-john-horowitz\/","title":{"rendered":"Creative Destruction vs. Monopoly\u2013 by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">A longstanding criticism of capitalism is that it inevitably drifts toward monopoly. Dominant firms, the argument goes, overcharge consumers, underpay workers, degrade the environment, and concentrate wealth in the hands of a self<\/span>\u2011<span data-contrast=\"auto\">perpetuating elite powerful enough to distort democratic institutions. To restrain this \u201cwild beast\u201d of exploitative monopoly, government must intervene through regulation, price and profit controls, antitrust enforcement, or, if necessary, direct public ownership of key industries. In short, some degree of socialism is\u00a0often\u00a0presented as the only safeguard of the public interest.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559740&quot;:240}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">This view may sound persuasive if one imagines the economy as a fixed structure in which production and consumption patterns rarely change. But that static picture misses the dynamic, evolving character of American capitalism. Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described capitalism\u2019s \u201cessential fact\u201d as creative destruction\u2014the relentless process by which new firms, ideas, and technologies overturn the old,\u00a0distributing\u00a0benefits widely. Even entrenched giants cannot escape this pressure. Eastman Kodak\u2019s once<\/span>\u2011<span data-contrast=\"auto\">dominant position in camera film, which seemed unassailable throughout the 20th century, is largely irrelevant in the digital age.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559740&quot;:240}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">A similar perspective was championed closer to home by Wabash College economist Ben Rogge. Though Rogge passed away in 1980, his influence on generations of students remains strong. He played a key role in bringing Milton Friedman to Wabash in the summer of 1956 to deliver a series of lectures that later became Friedman\u2019s seminal 1962 book,\u00a0<\/span><span data-contrast=\"auto\">Capitalism and Freedom.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559740&quot;:240}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">In 1975, Rogge captured the heart of\u00a0this\u00a0competitive dynamism when he wrote: \u201cCompetition is a never<\/span>\u2011<span data-contrast=\"auto\">ending game of leap<\/span>\u2011<span data-contrast=\"auto\">frog\u2026<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/reason.com\/2025\/11\/27\/archives-december-2025\/\"><span data-contrast=\"none\">and it makes no difference whether you have one firm, two firms or six firms. It makes no difference how much money they are making at any given moment of time.<\/span><\/a><span data-contrast=\"auto\">\u00a0Don\u2019t break up IBM. Don\u2019t break up U.S. Steel. Don\u2019t break up the New York Yankees. Time and tide will take care of everything in the form of this leapfrogging process, of someone coming up with a new idea and leapfrogging over the old.\u201d<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559740&quot;:240}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span data-contrast=\"auto\">History has proven Rogge strikingly prescient. IBM still holds a commanding share of the shrinking mainframe market, but mainframes\u00a0have long ceased to define modern computing. U.S. Steel, the world&#8217;s largest steelmaker in 1975, does not rank among the top 20 today. And the New York Yankees,\u00a0dominant before 1975,\u00a0have won \u201conly\u201d seven World Series titles since, compared with nineteen in the preceding fifty years.\u00a0American capitalism\u00a0does not\u00a0trend to\u00a0entrenched\u00a0monopoly. Leapfrog after leapfrog, ribbet, ribbet.<\/span><span data-ccp-props=\"{&quot;201341983&quot;:0,&quot;335559731&quot;:720,&quot;335559740&quot;:240}\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A longstanding criticism of capitalism is that it inevitably drifts toward monopoly. Dominant firms, the argument goes, overcharge consumers, underpay workers, degrade the environment, and concentrate wealth in the hands of a self\u2011perpetuating elite powerful enough to distort democratic institutions. To restrain this \u201cwild beast\u201d of exploitative monopoly, government must intervene through regulation, price and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[462],"tags":[1722,505,303,1721,1663,1068,740,1723,347,1191],"class_list":["post-195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microeconomics","tag-antitrust","tag-capitalism","tag-competition","tag-creative-destruction","tag-economic-theory","tag-innovation","tag-joseph-schumpeter","tag-market-dynamics","tag-milton-friedman","tag-monopoly"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Creative Destruction vs. Monopoly\u2013 by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz - Econ Briefs<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/people.bsu.edu\/econbriefs\/2026\/05\/04\/creative-destruction-vs-monopoly-by-dr-cecil-bohanon-and-dr-john-horowitz\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Creative Destruction vs. Monopoly\u2013 by Dr. Cecil Bohanon and Dr. John Horowitz - Econ Briefs\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A longstanding criticism of capitalism is that it inevitably drifts toward monopoly. 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