> We consumers benefit from competition
Look where the "competition" of the last 30 years brought the Western world: domestic electronics production is all but dead outside of military and R&D depending on quick turnaround because it got moved off to China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea, domestic pharmaceutics and chemical production is all but dead because India and China are absurdly cheaper, domestic steel production has taken serious hits for the same reason, animal welfare in farming is all but gone with farmers preventively feeding antibiotics to avoid immediate population collapse because the large meatpackers and chain stores act absolutely ruthlessly to make more profit, wages have gone down across the board when compared with inflation and large parts of our societies have no emergency funds...
> and loose from higher prices and poorer products produced by monopolies.
Competition itself is not bad, it keeps societies from stagnation - but too much and the side effects are now worse than the starting point. The Western world after decades of "competition" now depends on genocidal dictatorships (China), ordinary dictatorships (oil sheiks) and declining democracies (India) for its basic survival, and inside of our economies we got monopolies and oligopolies at a scale that was unbelievable even in the 90s.