His great example of a monopoly is Google, however Google doesn't have the kind of monopoly that other companies have. It's easy for people to switch search engines and if Google lets people down, it leaves room for competition, therefore they have to continually innovate, otherwise a competitor can pop up that will do to them what they did to AltaVista or Yahoo. It's easy to switch emails, especially webmail, therefore they had to produce the best webmail experience on the market and had to keep adding value add-ons. It's easy to switch phones and it's easy for phone makers to pull the rug under Google's feet, therefore they had to produce a reasonable alternative to iOS to ensure their survival.
I don't really know what he refers to when he says "perfect competition", but I wouldn't describe air-lines as being in a perfect competitions. The planes I fly on are refurbished planes built 20 years ago, with no room for my feet, extremely shitty service, the airport experience is extremely shitty and to top it off the tickets are still way too expensive if you don't buy with months in advance. That's not competition, that's an oligopoly.
Google hasn't showed monopolistic behavior until they started to deeply integrate their products with each other, creating their lock-in effect. And I remember other companies that did so, most notably Microsoft and it wasn't good for anybody, not even Microsoft.
I think you are confusing capitalism with free and competitive markets. Capitalists probably prefer central planning and regulation as long as it benefits them.
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Capitalism is not synonymous with competition, in fact Thiel has made a point of expressing his monopolistic philosophy [0].
0 - http://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-fo...
I do not agree with his opinions on the matter.
His great example of a monopoly is Google, however Google doesn't have the kind of monopoly that other companies have. It's easy for people to switch search engines and if Google lets people down, it leaves room for competition, therefore they have to continually innovate, otherwise a competitor can pop up that will do to them what they did to AltaVista or Yahoo. It's easy to switch emails, especially webmail, therefore they had to produce the best webmail experience on the market and had to keep adding value add-ons. It's easy to switch phones and it's easy for phone makers to pull the rug under Google's feet, therefore they had to produce a reasonable alternative to iOS to ensure their survival.
I don't really know what he refers to when he says "perfect competition", but I wouldn't describe air-lines as being in a perfect competitions. The planes I fly on are refurbished planes built 20 years ago, with no room for my feet, extremely shitty service, the airport experience is extremely shitty and to top it off the tickets are still way too expensive if you don't buy with months in advance. That's not competition, that's an oligopoly.
Google hasn't showed monopolistic behavior until they started to deeply integrate their products with each other, creating their lock-in effect. And I remember other companies that did so, most notably Microsoft and it wasn't good for anybody, not even Microsoft.
Central planning is the antithesis of capitalism, nothing to do with competition.
I think you are confusing capitalism with free and competitive markets. Capitalists probably prefer central planning and regulation as long as it benefits them.
And Thiel makes it abundantly clear that competition is not the end goal as most markets are not static.
So essentially Thiel isn't advocating "pure" capitalism, because using any methodology as a catch-all is bad practice.