Though the free-market faithful have long preached that competition creates efficiency, as if it were a law of nature, nature itself teaches a different lesson. The seductively simple story of the virtues of competition contains some general theoretical truth, but execution is how theory dies, and we can’t let blind faith prevent us from seeing the deviling details of how it operates in practice. Unregulated competition in nature regularly delivers disaster. And ignoring nature’s lessons for our economy would have us be as dumb as trees. Competition frequently creates foolish costs and undesirable outcomes. - blogs.scientificamerican.com