• Proponents may claim that the free market would not allocate costs "fairly" among customers. For instance, they complain that a private provider of postal services would charge higher rates for rural delivery than for urban delivery. As we have shown, the long-run free-market price of a good or service tends toward its total marginal cost to producers; that is, each customer tends to pay a price that corresponds to the costs that his or her consumption choice imposes on producers. Whether such pricing is "fair" is not a praxeological issue, but an ethical one. From the ethical perspective of rational egoism, such a system can be viewed as a practical implementation of the virtue of justice (pp. 3.10:19-34), and any attempt to override it must be denounced as fundamentally unfair. But even if one regards this pricing system as unfair and seeks to override it, it would be more honest to abolish the monopoly, while granting overt subsidies to the rural users whom one wishes to receive special preference. Although such subsidies have other adverse effects, discussed later in this section, this alternative would at least enable all consumers to enjoy the benefits of competition.

People are more inclined to accept coercive monopolies such as the postal authority because the improvements and modernizations that competition might have provided cannot be actually seen or even imagined in detail. To concrete-bound observers, the argument that monopoly engenders stagnation and inefficiency seems merely theoretical. As has already been observed (cf. p. 4.11:75, including "Suggested Reading"), a full appreciation of the adverse effects of regulation requires that we learn to think in concepts, and not merely in terms of the immediately visible.     

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