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Kamala Harris economic plan to focus on groceries, housing and healthcare
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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We live in capitalism. How do you mandate lower grocery prices in that?
(I guess we find out Friday?)
Having a strong and active FTC working to break apart (almost) monopolistic grocery store chains would be a good start.
Even threatening them with that would be a tiny step in the right direction.
I live in a large enough city to have choices and everyone is price gouging.
So, I don't see how this would really help much tbh.
and having a strong and active FTC working to enforce price gouging laws would really help too.
That's true. My point wasn't a strong ftc is bad but that near monopolies aren't the issue. There's collusion happening and breaking up monopolies isn't going to fix that.
A larger number of competitors has a natural tendency to make collusion more difficult. You are correct that the collusion needs to be aggressively addressed too. Ideally, that would just be a matter of strengthening and enforcing laws. But, I think increasing competition also helps create a market where collusion and price gouging are naturally much less likely.
Increasing competition is good but my point is that because this situation is an oligopoly rather than a monopoly, aggressive price/profit regulations for people's basic needs and enforcement will get us further faster and have more staying power than trying to break up a half dozen mega corporations (especially with how involved they are in politics).
Preventing further market concentration, such as Albertsons/Kroger, is definitely needed. And breaking Amazon and Whole Foods up would be good. But it's hard to argue that a monopoly is a monopoly when there's three other oligopoly corporations nearby. Which will make breaking them up difficult.
Subsidizing small grocers and food suppliers while aggressively taxing megacorps would also create market incentives that would move us towards more competition.
Salient points. I'm sold.
You probably don’t remember the big fight over seat belts, but it was a thing. As a virtual hologram of a 1970’s Emergency Room doctor, I can tell you. The government mandating seat belts saved much more than lives. It saved trauma, years lost, careers, money - so much more.
But at the time people were all like, “What are they gonna do - force me to wear a seat belt? In my own car? How is that gonna help?”
It’s like that sometimes.
Same for air bags. They were going to make cars unaffordable. Same for drunk driving, "What? I can't have a beer or two on the way home?!" (Actually, you can have a beer or two, you can't be impaired.)
Remember drinking and driving? That was a whole thing too.
Geez so that's why that cop was such a dick.
I'm for preventing monopolies and breaking them up.
My point wasn't that that's a bad thing. But that this is more of an oligopoly situation rather than a monopoly.
My town has Walmart, Kroger, Target, and a Co-OP within five minutes of my house. They're all gouging prices and have been since the pandemic.
This isn't a situation where breaking up monopolies is the cure. Though preventing the Kroger/Albertsons merger will certainly keep things from getting worse.
You listed three megacorps and a co-op as your local food suppliers. Those three megacorps set the market prices. If they were broken into the 50 smaller companies that they originally consumed or destroyed over the years, there could be real competition again, driving prices lower. It may be hard to imagine several smaller stores instead of just a few huge ones, but that was how things used to be many years ago. As a kid, I worked at a few of them that are now long extinct, having been consumed or destroyed by the megacorps.
It was a different landscape, where grocery stores aggressively competed on price with weekly and daily specials that were genuinely trying to undercut competitors. It was real. I saw it with my own eyes. Families would drive two blocks further down the street to a competitor because something was a tiny bit cheaper there that week. This sounds bizarre and foreign now because competition does not exist anymore. What exists now are megacorps.
The Kamala campaign is correct. The more that is done to create a competitive landscape, the lower prices will become. Can they really be broken up? Yes. Will they be broken up? I guess that depends on how much lobby money the megacorps are willing to spend.
Yes, but the term is oligopoly. And it requires different tactics than breaking up monopolies because they're not a monopoly.
I made a longer post explaining here. Sorry if I'm coming off as pedantic but I find the distinction in this instance between oligopoly and monopoly important.
https://lemm.ee/post/39694050/14065675
This is excellent. Thank you.
Government can help a lot of the time, was my only aside there. But yes oligopoly busting would also be helpful.
Odd, but I have the opposite experience. Small hick town and I'm loaded with choices, most of which are cheap.
You don't. Price controls don't work and usually backfire in the long run.
Instead, you modify the incentives which exist around prices via taxation. As a simplified example, if you want to prioritize lower prices on staples such as milk, vegetables or beef, then businesses which can show that their margins on those products are within a defined range pay 1% less on corporate taxes. The numbers and ranges would need to be discovered via both study and experimentation. But, by tying a savings for those business to their behavior, said behavior can be influenced. The prices can then be further manipulated lower in the logistical chain, either by direct subsidy or via similar manipulation of incentives to growers and distributors.
Yes, but functional capitalism requires regulation to prevent monopolies, collusion and other activities which distort markets. And there are plenty of areas where capitalism fails and government (read:socialism) needs to step in to provide something which society needs, but for which the incentives do not exist to provide it in an efficient manner. Or for which the efficient providing of that thing creates moral hazards. There is a reason we don't privatize the military.
You break up monopolies