Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies • Hacker News Board

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#261

Post by tim333 » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 1:54 AM UTC

skummetmaelk wrote: post #28

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…

That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.

The problem in this particular case seems not to be too much freedom to buy and sell things but overreach by the courts. If some syringe supplier slips stuff into the small print that they will be the only supplier for ever after then the legal system should refuse to enforce that as is probably the case in most places outside the US.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#262

Post by douche » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:01 AM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #175

douche wrote: post #6

Or make it profitable to build shit in this country again. If you taxed the hell out of manufactured imports, and loosened up the regulations that are choking US businesses to death, you'd have less meth-and-fentanyl scourged abandoned mill towns.

If you tax the hell out of manufactured imports, you hurt our best businesses and drive up prices on everything for everyone. You really think you can force Apple to build iPhones in the US for twice the cost that Samsung will build Galaxys in Asia for? Do you think US iOS developers are going to still make $20B a year after you do it? Do you think bringing minimum wage manufacturing jobs back to america is a good id…

> You really think you can force Apple to build iPhones in the US for twice the cost that Samsung will build Galaxys in Asia for?

Boohoo, thay might have half their markup eaten up if they built them someplace that doesn't have to have suicide nets underneath the windows of the factory.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#263

Post by curun1r » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:06 AM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #148

bluejekyll wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Another anecdata on the "worse for me" side...

My income has been pretty irregular over the past few years. All but two months I've made $0. In two months I made many tens of thousands of dollars. I got denied for free coverage because of the two months I earned money. I got denied for purchasing through the exchange because my projected income was $0/mo. /me is an edge case, I guess. So, having some time off, I left the country for 8 months and didn't purchase US insurance while I was on the other side of the globe. Another edge case found...since I wasn't outside of the country for 11 months in a calendar year, I had to pay the penalty for the entire year, despite being nowhere near US health services for the entirety of the time I didn't have health coverage. I now have health coverage that I'm purchasing directly from a health insurer. It's expensive and a plan I could have bought pre-Obamacare.

As a programmer, I see Obamacare as the equivalent of rushed code that only works for the primary success case and crashes whenever you throw any abnormal situation at it. Too bad they couldn't have hired Silicon Valley engineers to fix the legislation as well as they fixed the healthcare.gov website. I've found at least 3 bugs in it that need to be fixed.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#264

Post by ende » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:08 AM UTC

Clubber wrote: post #234

skummetmaelk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.

The end state of free market (as in free of government regulation, not free to compete) is monopoly. Capitalist societies understand that and regulate to ensure freedom to compete. Europe is much better at this than the US.

Incorrect. Monopolies do not naturally occur in most markets (with a few exceptions). The barriers to entry that create monopolies arise largely from regulatory capture. Some level of regulation is often necessary, but devising regimes that don't favor early entrants is very difficult. Nobody does this well; neither the US nor Europe.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#265

Post by burfog » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:14 AM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #36

mlinksva wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a link in the next paragraph to http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/julyaugust-2010/dirty-... which tells more of the story. Claim is that rule change allowed hospitals to join group purchasing organiations (GPOs) which could get their fees from vendors rather than buyers, essentially creating a system of kickbacks from dominant vendors, which could be large enough for GPOs and thus hospitals and thus patie…

The dominant company might not have agreed to decent terms. After all, they own the market so they can starve a startup out. Though you are right, you'd think they would want to sell an improved syringe at huge margins.

Go to the nurse unions. Perhaps the next contract could require the syringe.

Go to congress. Lobby. While you may be outspent, that isn't everything. You can also apply pressure via an ad campaign, asking voters to demand that nurses are safe. There is some real emotional appeal potential here.

End result: the dominant company is forced to cave in some way. They can buy the syringe, allow an exception for the syringe, or just lose 100% of their customers.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#266

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:17 AM UTC

ende wrote: post #264

Clubber wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end state of free market (as in free of government regulation, not free to compete) is monopoly. Capitalist societies understand that and regulate to ensure freedom to compete. Europe is much better at this than the US.

Incorrect. Monopolies do not naturally occur in most markets (with a few exceptions). The barriers to entry that create monopolies arise largely from regulatory capture. Some level of regulation is often necessary, but devising regimes that don't favor early entrants is very difficult. Nobody does this well; neither the US nor Europe.

> Monopolies do not naturally occur in most market

They naturally occur in markets with network externalities, which are quite common.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#267

Post by maxxxxx » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:17 AM UTC

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…

I am not sure how to pull this off in practice but I think it would be healthy for an economy if companies couldn't grow beyond a certain size. Once companies get too big they pretty much kill new and innovative companies. Just look at how quickly small companies in the 70s and early 80s innovated around personal computing and how little innovation is happening in the smart phone or search engine area now because Google and Apple are pretty much trampling over the small guys.

Again, I have no idea how to do this in practice.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#268

Post by maxxxxx » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:20 AM UTC

valuearb wrote: post #180

arrosenberg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart. Walmart has destroyed thousands of businesses. Now you can argue the consumer got lower prices, but low prices don't matter when no one has money to afford them. Additionally, those economies of scale produced cheap, disposable, polluting goods that have an engineered lifetime so that customers have to keep buying the same appliance (or whatever) over and over. The question isn't when economies of scale hurt…

Walmart has been a huge boon to the middle class. It's inarguable that consumers got lower prices, substantially lower prices. That's increased their standard of living. You can argue that Walmart hurt the standard of living of the Americans (less than 1% of US employees) who actually work for it. But that ignores the fact that the smaller competitors didn't pay much better, and never had a stock option plan, so the…

I think Walmart has damaged the economy a lot. Maybe smaller companies are less efficient but Walmart has destroyed a lot of small business that provided fairly stable jobs to middle class people.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#269

Post by ericHosick » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:25 AM UTC

jaredklewis wrote: post #249

ericHosick wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deep discussion to have: too deep for a medium like HN. That being said... Your points pre-suppose parties consented to a dispute resolution system: one that is based on arbitrary boundaries and quite monopolistic (1). > I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market" is very free. So, I agree that it is hard for people to understand what consent is when they were never given a ch…

What you say is true much of the time, but it is also true that consumers often do "choose" their arbiter. The aforementioned adhesion contracts often stipulate a private (non-government) arbiter, which the consumer (probably you, too) consents to of their own free will. I see your points. But I kind of feel like we were having a rather nuts and bolts discussion about how to improve security in Linux, and then someon…

> If achieving a free market requires a complete upheaval of all of our governments and laws, then the idea isn't very useful.

The idea is extremely useful: act consensual to others. There is no better basis of a social system than this. Having conversations like the one were having now is really all we need. To force the ideas on others in anyway, especially through democracy, would be hypocritical.

A social system based on utility, which is basically all social systems we've had throughout history, is violent, aggressive and dangerous. No wonder history repeats itself.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#270

Post by scythe » Mon, Apr 24, 2017, 2:45 AM UTC

ericHosick wrote: post #113

Qwertious wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.' Don't call it the free market. Call it what it is: COMPETITION. "Free market" implies "I can do what I want", but frankly we don't WANT people to be free to pull anti-c…

> "Free market" implies "I can do what I want" I always though free implied free from non-consensual acts. It's not much of a free market if your actions are non-consensual (1). (1) Defining what makes an action consensual is difficult but doable.

The ability of consensual exchange to increase utility for both parties frays at the limits of the ability of the parties giving consent to predict the results of their decision. Our ability to express the inherent failings of consensual contracts requires us to understand the limits of our own predictive power, which turns out to be a monstrously difficult scientific question.

However, it seems to me that, if one party to a negotiation takes actions which are intended to limit the other's understanding of the exchange, the usefulness of consent as a mechanism to prevent bad trades is degraded. This is not quite violence, but it is scummy, and it doesn't seem that it would be "anti-capitalist" to restrict it.