The Competition Paradox: Markets, Rent, and Sovereign Corporations Through the Lens of Smith, Ricardo, and Rawls (Coppack, 2026)

Summary

"The Competition Paradox: Markets, Rent, and Sovereign Corporations Through the Lens of Smith, Ricardo, and Rawls," by Philip Coppack (Professor, Department of Geography and Urban Sustainability, Toronto Metropolitan University), is a self-published report (posted 17 June 2026 to TMU's RShare repository, CC BY 4.0) — not a peer-reviewed journal article. Note: the queue item's own metadata mislabeled the title's third theorist as "Marx"; the paper's actual title names Rawls, and this page cites it correctly.

The Argument

Coppack argues capitalism contains an internal "Competition Paradox": competitive markets, by rewarding successful firms, tend to generate concentrations of economic power that then suppress the very competition that produced them. He traces this through three classical thinkers: Adam Smith's warnings about chartered monopolies (using the British and Dutch East India Companies as historical precedents), David Ricardo's distinction between productive profit and economic rent, and John Rawls's theory of justice and institutional legitimacy. The central concept is "sovereign corporations" — modern firms (Coppack names Amazon and Alphabet/Google specifically) that acquire quasi-governmental power — rule-setting, gatekeeping, infrastructural indispensability — not through a formal royal charter as the East India Company had, but through sheer scale and control of infrastructure. He cites Thomas Piketty, Michael Hudson, Lazonick, Tepper & Hearn, and De Loecker/Eeckhout/Unger on market power, plus McKinsey Global Institute data showing global net worth has outpaced global GDP since roughly 2000, driven by real-estate and financial-asset appreciation rather than productive investment. The paper's closing question is whether "market participants increasingly become market governors," and whether states remain sovereign in practice as corporations increasingly shape the conditions under which states themselves operate.

Relation to the Georgist Case

Ricardo's rent-vs-profit distinction is a direct throughline of Coppack's argument, and the "sovereign corporations" framing is a useful addition to the wiki's rentier and superstar firms coverage of whether modern corporate power should be read as monopoly rent extraction or legitimate scale economies. However, the paper's focus is squarely on corporate and monopoly power generally — Big Tech, finance, antitrust — rather than land value or land value taxation specifically: no mention of Georgism, Henry George, or land value tax appears anywhere in the full text. It belongs on the wiki as general rent-theory and monopoly-power context, not as a land-specific finding.

Nuances and Limits

• Self-published, not peer-reviewed. This is explicitly a "report" (per RShare's own metadata, not a "thesis" despite the scanner's mislabeling), one of several self-archived political-economy essays by the same author on the same repository, none of which appear to be peer-reviewed journal publications. Rated Supplementary tier accordingly.
• General monopoly-power theory, not Georgist or land-specific. The paper never engages Henry George, land value taxation, or the wiki's land-rent framework directly; its relevance here is as background context for the broader rent-vs-profit and market-power literature this wiki also tracks in non-land domains.
• Full text read directly (A-claim). The complete 50-page report was obtained and read in full via Figshare's public API (the RShare web interface itself was inaccessible to this session).

Bears On

• Concept: Rentier — the "sovereign corporations" framing is a fresh vocabulary for the same modern-monopoly-rent question this page already tracks.
• Concept: Superstar Firms — engages directly with the same "is this rent or legitimate scale economy" debate this concept already frames as contested.
• Person: David Ricardo — Ricardo's productive-profit-vs-rent distinction is the paper's central classical anchor.

See Also

• Rentier
• Superstar Firms
• David Ricardo
• Economic Rent

Sources

1. Philip Coppack (2026), "The Competition Paradox: Markets, Rent, and Sovereign Corporations Through the Lens of Smith, Ricardo, and Rawls," self-published report, Toronto Metropolitan University RShare repository, DOI 10.32920/32717289.v1, posted 17 June 2026, CC BY 4.0. Full text read directly 2026-08-29 via Figshare's public API (api.figshare.com, item ID 32717289) after the RShare web interface itself proved inaccessible to this session; direct file: ndownloader.figshare.com, file ID 65647782 — used for the Competition Paradox thesis, the Smith/Ricardo/Rawls throughline, the "sovereign corporations" concept, the Amazon/Alphabet examples, and the cited literature (Piketty, Hudson, Lazonick, De Loecker/Eeckhout/Unger, McKinsey Global Institute) (A-claim; full text, 50 pages).