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Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#141

Post by valuearb »

bluejekyll wrote: post #109
shmerl wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market means free from monopolies as well.

Conversely, a free market is free for monopolies to form; is free to charge whatever they want; is free to block other companies from entering and selling to a company via any means short of bribery (although even that could be thought of as free); is free to to do anything when competing short of breaking the law. We do not live in a free society, we are not free to do whatever we want; for example, I don't think an…

Free markets means they are free to entry, which means creating a monopoly is impossible.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#142

Post by valuearb »

bko wrote: post #67
cs702 wrote: post #4

"I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public health officials, a major grant from the National Institutes of Health and robust private investment. But when my partn…

> A market in which buyers are not free to choose better products is not a free market. Most businesses can choose better products (not sure about hospital industry). They can also choose to sign an agreement that makes a supplier relationship exclusive. For instance, a restaurant can sign an agreement to accept only Mastercard. Is this not a free market?

A restaurant that agrees to exclusively accept Mastercard would be out of business very quickly (no matter how much Mastercard lowered its fees for them). That's why we don't have to regulate such behavior.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#143

Post by VLM »

IIIIIIIIIIII wrote: post #35
bko wrote: post #3

> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public heal…

I can speak for a different market in a different country (but I also lived in the US for a decade): IT freelancing in Germany. I get paid well, but there is something really strange going on: I can't get my contracts directly. I always have to go through a company whose sole business it is to be an intermediate between the (large) company that wants to hire a freelancer and the freelancer. Note that those freelancer…

The human labor cost of processing a contract goes up at a more than linear rate with the size of the company.

Meanwhile, "managing" contracts is almost as expensive as managing employees.

At some point having an accounting dept manage 10K contracts is simply impossible.

Its a labor and control fraud limitation not technological.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#144

Post by bko »

maxerickson wrote: post #70
bko wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your hypothetical scenario is suggesting that there are no alternative for 99% of the monopoly provider's products and only a better alternative from the 1%? No alternatives for the 99% even with a 50% markup (50 discounted vs 100 full price)? In that case, the buyer is much better off with a 50% discount on 99% of the products since no alternative exists, even at the 100 full price.

That's the argument being made. The buyer is better off staying with the single supplier. The argument is that this is a breakdown in markets and should be regulated (for instance by breaking the supplier apart).

If the buyer is better off, and presumably the consumer, who's worse off? The woman who wrote the article that can't compete? She can't force the hospital to go against its interest and purchase her product?

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#145

Post by valuearb »

mjevans wrote: post #87
ams6110 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't pass the smell test to me. So a big company had 80% of the market? What about the other 20%?

Think Intel, AMD, and um, who else makes desktop grade chips? (No, netbooks/tops don't count)

Intel has never been a monopoly. There have always been dozens of competitors in most of their markets. Even at the height of Wintel, there was AMD and others. Intel didn't win there because it was able to shut out competitors, those competitors copied Intel designed instruction sets and Intel couldn't stop them from doing it. Intel dominated the market because of their better processes.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#146

Post by bko »

JackFr wrote: post #102
bko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A market in which buyers are not free to choose better products is not a free market. Most businesses can choose better products (not sure about hospital industry). They can also choose to sign an agreement that makes a supplier relationship exclusive. For instance, a restaurant can sign an agreement to accept only Mastercard. Is this not a free market?

Yeah so the point is that if the only restaurant in the USA is Applebee's and they sign an exclusive agreement with Mastercard, they are extending their monopoly -- likely illegally in the US: "But exclusive dealing also can be anticompetitive in some circumstances. For example, exclusive dealing may allow one manufacturer, in effect, to monopolize efficient distribution services and thereby prevent its rivals from c…

The ironic thing is that the only way I can conceive we could be in a situation in which there is only one restaurant in the USA, is through over-regulation and treating restaurants as a utility. Food is important after-all and can't be left to the markets, as some may argue.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#148

Post by valuearb »

bluejekyll wrote: post #123
whopa wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Health care is squarely an economic/business issue that affects nearly everybody, and there are clear, meaningful differences between the two parties here.

AHCA, Obamacare is definitely better than before, it guarantees open access to many who didn't have it before. A good thing. But it didn't go far enough. It played in to the corporate healthcare system demands by not offering a competitive public option. The so called Blue Dog democrats blocked that, which is such a shame. Far better than anything the Republicans have put on the table. The problem is that we basicall…

Obamacare increased the cost of my families healthcare from $400 a month to $1800 a month, and now my family doesn't have long term healthcare insurance.

So please keep telling me how it's better.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#149

Post by bko »

valuearb wrote: post #142
bko wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A market in which buyers are not free to choose better products is not a free market. Most businesses can choose better products (not sure about hospital industry). They can also choose to sign an agreement that makes a supplier relationship exclusive. For instance, a restaurant can sign an agreement to accept only Mastercard. Is this not a free market?

A restaurant that agrees to exclusively accept Mastercard would be out of business very quickly (no matter how much Mastercard lowered its fees for them). That's why we don't have to regulate such behavior.

So what you're saying is that market forces prevent this behavior that harms consumers and pushes an inferior product?

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#150

Post by Aloisius »

ams6110 wrote: post #71
socialist_coder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what your point is. This isn't a free market because of monopolies or because of regulations? To me, it seems like we have a completely free market here... and that is the problem. Companies are free to create and exploit monopolies. It's the final state of a completely free market.

80% of the market is not an unassailable monopoly. Such things rarely if ever exist unless they are created by regulation.

That depends on the actions of the market leader no?

There are any number of anticompetitive practices that the market leader can engage in to effectively eliminate any threat to their monopoly from tying to predatory pricing to exclusive deals.

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