Well, when I talk about competition, I’m mainly talking about genuine political competition, something we lack here in the states because of anti democratic features of the system like the Senate and the Electoral College, but also because of certain practices we indulge like gerrymandering, the filibuster, voter suppression, and our refusal to expand the size of the House of Representatives as population grows.

I agree that a libertarian economic model would tend toward rent seeking (indeed the logic of libertarianism requires authoritarianism, as I argued in a previous article). But a competitive market economy to my understanding presupposes a competitive political process, and only results in rent seeking and other forms of market failure to the extent that political processes are uncompetitive.