Went to Ikea today. Ikea really supplies from many countries - the labels I read had China, USA, Israel, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Portugal, Spain, Italy... and probably more that I have forgotten. I had a fun time running around and guessing before looking.

After listening to this podcast and reading the associated article, I think I finally understand the difference between political and free market competition. The issue clarified was rent seeking, both how it is defined and why it is harmful. Robert Tollison, an American economist who specializes in public choice theory (wikipedia):

Rent seeking is the expenditure of scarce resources to capture an artificially created transfer.

Basically, it is harmful to give things away for free. This is because people will compete to influence your choice (of who to give to), but since you refuse to accept money, they will spend on things which do not increase your ability to conjure up more of the supplied good, e.g. a more convincing proposal or a more extravagant charity event. The surplus from the exchange is thus partly dissipated away. This type of behavior is known as rent seeking.

A few weeks back, I posted a talk on the collapse of the middle class. In that talk, rising education expenses were identified as a major contributor to the fiscal fragility of the middle class family. In this article from The Chronicle Of Higher Education, Marty Nemko talks about how much of a waste college is for many, despite greatly increased spending. Nemko writes

... most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

HT: EconLog