Yes, I did. And you can prove that wrong with a case history.
In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).
Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:
"You can always present a case history of one".
Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".
Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".
In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.
A free market in this construction must necessarily lack monopolies. There is no counterfactual observation that could falsify the proposition because the definition of free market doesn't admit a counterexample.
Congratulations. That's an epistemic trap.
There are many examples of natural monopolies, which is a concept that has been recognized in economic theory for at least two centuries. Walter is either being deliberately obtuse or is ignorant of history.
AT&T, Western Union, most railroads, many local utilities—all examples of monopolies that formed "naturally" i.e. without state intervention.
Insofar as there was state intervention in the formation of these monopolies, it was because the state intervened on the company's behalf to suspend antitrust law—such as in the case of AT&T, where the government decided it would be most efficient to permit AT&T to continue operating as a monopoly (until it didn't, and broke AT&T up).
I'm honestly fine with whatever definitions, but they need to be able to cross the chasm from concept to criterion in conjunction or disjunction to be useful as a means of discriminating. So far, Walter's proposed definitions for monopolies and free markets together fail this test even if they're separately some measure of fine, inaccuracies relative to their term-of-art counterparts notwithstanding.
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There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
Any other examples?
Microsoft was briefly deemed a monopoly by engaging in anti-competitive practices and abusing its market leadership to squash competition, like artificially blocking the use of DR-DOS to install Windows [1].
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
> Microsoft wasn't protected by the government.
> Yes they were, by copyright law.
> But the government didn't set out to make Microsoft a monopoly.
Over time, I've come to conclude that copyright should not be a monopoly, or at least the copyright protection shouldn't last more than a handful of years.