Fact: Most big businesses are not monopolies and not all monopolies are big business. Take cranberry juice. How do we know that the price being charged is not far above their costs of production? We don’t. We actually have no idea of how much it costs to produce a bottle or can of cranberry juice. Competition makes it unnecessary for us to know. If the price of apple juice is higher than necessary to compensate for the costs incurred in producing it, the result is a high rate of profit. Only, this is never done in a vacuum. Word gets out that there is a lot of money to be made in cranberry juice. This automatically attracts more investment into the cranberry juice industry creating more competition. Eventually, these additional competitors will drive prices down to a level that compensates the costs with the same average rate of return on similar investment available elsewhere. When that happens, the in-flow of investments from other sectors of the economy stop. The incentive of a hi...