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I agree, but would like the same thought applied to the private sector. I read a lot of comments who are extremely critical of every bit of power a state assumes, but have no problem if a private company reaches a practical monopoly or gets access to every intimate detail of peoples' lives.

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The theory is that inefficient companies die in the open marketplace, and bad leadership is inefficient.

This fails to account for the sheer scale and encumbancy advantages of massive corporations. It also fails to account that efficiency can be appallingly evil.

Yeah, I feel this often confuses what "efficiency" means from the company's perspective vs wider society's perspective.

A company that streamlines its operations and archives a huge profit margin is clearly efficient from the PoV of its own management and shareholders. However from the PoV of its customers, it's maximally inefficient, because it tries to extract the highest price for the least amount of work done that people are still willing to pay.

Even Hayek was a proponent of robust antitrust measures for this reason. And he's hardly a figure of the political left.

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