But I was stumped: this just seemed like competition. Isn’t competition supposed to be good? How could the outcome seem so bad? It turns out that rent-seeking “competition” is a contest for a fixed price, a zero-sum problem that works like a transfer, at best. Competition in markets has no fixed price, and is robustly positive-sum. In politics you try to move money around and take credit for it. In markets you try to create value and make profits.