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Price gouging
(i.ibb.co)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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I don't think there should be price caps, but, I think we could get somewhere having a maximum amount you're allowed to raise your prices by in a single year and how long you have to take to get there.
I think this rate should be tied to federal interest rates to create a competing class interest to the owner class wanting interest rates to stay low forever even if it breaks the bank for everyone else.
I mean, just break up the massive corporations. Capitalism requires seller competition in the marketplace in order to provide an incentive to drive down prices. If there are too few players, they can easily make unspoken agreements to fuck over consumers.
The problem is we have historical evidence to show that that doesn't exactly work. Standard Oil's broken up parts have mostly been able to informally collude with one another on "turf" and in some cases even defy having been broken up to reacquire each other.
So in the 113 years since they broke up Standard Oil, some of the beneficial effects have worn off?
Darn only a century of benefit. Guess it was a failure because the benefits weren’t eternal.
When exactly did the commenter above you claim that it's a recent phenomenon? It's not.
And it becomes increasingly hard to legislate against companies who hold such immense economic power, to the point of being able to buy your private media and ruin your campaign for elections if you threaten them
The oil companies reconglomerated, in part, because we stopped enforcing anti-trust nearly as much as originally intended when we started using the stupid-ass Chicago school of thought from the 1970s onwards. It's only in the last ten years or so that's it's become legally reasonable to say "hey actually the Chicago school of though kinda sucks." Standard Oil in particular is a bad anti-trust example because Rockefeller was such a personality cult that everyone around him was completely wrapped around his finger. In any case, you can still punish companies for price fixing if you've force them to be legally separate, which you can't do if it's all one legal organization.
The telecom industry is another example where anti-trust break-ups didn't lead to more competition, for somewhat similar reasons. They were broken up by geographic regions and each region made gentlemen's agreements not to expand into each other's territory. When we stopped enforcing anti-trust as much, they bought each other out.
In general, however, breaking up monopolies is effective, so long as doing so actually creates competition in the marketplace. This is most effective in markets with low barriers to entry or ones where there's already a large number of smaller companies that are simply too small for meaningful competition with mega-corp. It's least effective in markets with extremely high barriers to entry or ones where it's easy to collude and get away with it. In any case, it's still worth it to break up monopolistic companies because it still reduces their power, even if it does so more effectively in some markets than others. Among other benefits, it makes it easier for new competitors to establish themselves in the market, since their competitors have a harder time utilizing unfair practices the smaller they are.
We already have this. It’s called a free market and when you raise prices too high your competition takes all your business. It’s beautiful and everybody hates it due to multiple decades of anti-free-market propaganda.
Found the libertarian
I like how he keeps commenting the same nonsense and people are just ignoring it. Like obviously the "free market" prices for lots of goods were wrong. That's why people are pissed and companies are being forced to lower them.
Supply and demand do balance out... in the long run. The problem with that is (and what Libertarians never understand) in the long run we are all dead.
Libertarians are all fucking morons. They think humanity will react with good intentions only. It’s a mental disorder.
The theory works beautifully... For the first 30 years of capitalism. After a few decades, the more profitable and most competitive companies grow so much through consolidation of the market, that due to sheer economy of scale it becomes impossible to compete with them if you're not an equally well-established company in the same sector. Oligopolies and monopolies form, and it gets to a point where you can't outcompete them because the capital investment to be competitive would be so bonkers, and the presence of the two companies creating the same product at such humongous scales would saturate the market so much, that it makes absolutely no sense to try and outcompete them. And even if competition started to really appear, the bigger company buys it and competition is undone again.
You guys live in a parallel world, your axioms of "free market" simply don't hold up to the slightest scrutiny.