I just want to address the non-belevolent motivation, as well as the "outing competition" idea.First of all, my point is that you can never expect a human being to do something out of benevolence. In fact, if you leave everything to altruism, you end up with a lot less as far as living standards go. The beauty of anarcho-capitalism is that someone can be the biggest asshole on the face of the earth, yet still be my benefactor (or not, if I voluntarily choose to deal with someone else). It's up to me, the customer. Sure Rockefeller was motivated by greed, pride, ego, etc. But in the end it brought something to the world that we have never had in our history, and that alone FAR outweighs any negative aspects of him personally.Andrew Carnegie is another example. He dropped the price of steel rails down by about 80% from his HOME PRODUCTION facility. The guy was just nuts about cornering the steel market. This resulted in the ability for goods to move far more freely across the country, dropping the price of virtually everything that could be shipped - again, the customers win, no matter if the guy is a royal ass or not.Now, about beating out competition, cornering markets, etc. I would suggest you watch a video by Thomas E. Woods called "free market myths". He tackles a lot of the common myths about the market like price-collusion, price-gouging, etc. Very common sense and down to earth and also quite humorous.I guess you have to understand the broad scope position of the Austrian school in order to understand why beating out competition is good, why the million or so carriage drivers put out of work by Ford's automobile were a good thing. Everything that cannot be replicated is a scarce resource - this is a core tenet of the Austrian school. Trees, steel, oil, paper, and your labour are all "scarce goods". Only one person can own them at one time. A recipe, a sequence of notes or words, these are non-scarce goods - they can be replicated ad infinitum with virtually no effort and at virtually no cost.So, when the market inovates and creates something new that renders previously used scarce goods non-essential, it is a GOOD thing that these are allowed to be freed up and put to work somewhere more efficiently. people making typewriters in the 1970's were put out of business in the 80's and 90's by computer manufacturers - the market found a more efficient way to do something. Instead of subsidizing the delay in progress or bailing out the companies now losing money to the better product, they have to fail in order to free up all of the scarce resources being deployed to make typewriters. The market (you and me and everyone else) has determined that those resources should not be used in that way, simply becuase the company is no longer making money. That includes the labour. Switching to a robotic line versus a manual-installation line in manufacturing is a good thing. It allows the products to be made at a cheaper per-unit costs, which means I as a customer pay less money. Therefore less scarce resources (including capital) as a % of the whole are being devoted to one thing - my living standard increases because I am able to retain more of my money for other things. The people that were originally making the cars might be damaged in the short term by the layoffs, but their labour is now available to be put to a task that the market deems necessary. In the meantime, less labour is required to run a robotic line, but the people that are specialized in working with robotics and software are paid far higher than those who were assembling the cars - the innovation created an entirely new job (robotics, maintainence, programming, etc.) where someone's labour is more specialized and contributes more value per unit manufactured, ergo they are paid a higher wage.Another example is a backhoe. You could hire 20 guys to dig out a hole in the ground to pour a foundation. But one guy with a backhoe can do the same amount of work in a day. He is specialized compared to the fellows with the shovel. Therefore, he automatically gets paid more for his specialized labour (resulting in higher productivity) than the general-labour shovellers. I think that the thing that contributes to "wage-slavery" a lot more than simply overlord greed is the state. Aside from the regulations, the mandates, etc. you have the monetary distortions that come with a monopoly on legal tender AND no natural market restraint on its issue (metal-backed, fixed monetary supply, etc). This creates wage slavery since the new money created is first passed off to the political class to be spent before it is assimilated into the general economy and dilutes the value of all existing money. By the time it gets to you it's already discounted. The only thing keeping the wage-slaves alive (and by alive I mean that even people under the "poverty line" in the US have higher living standards than most upper-middle-class merchants in the early 1800's) is the fact that competition and increases in production keep dropping real prices of goods and services - computers down 90% since 1980, blue jeans down 55% since 1970, food down 25% since 1970, etc. (this does not apply to any offered government "services", such as municipal water, road upkeep, health care, etc. They have all actually outpaced inflation in their price increases since there is no natural market forces to force innovation. Ever wonder why we still pick up our trash the EXACT SAME WAY as we did in the damned 1920's when municipal governments took the business over?)Sorry for the long post - I thought it was going to be a paragraph or so lol. Oops.