is is precisely becaues they care about market share that some people will refuse to collude becaue they know that if they dont collude while everyone else does, they come out as big winners. lets hear a real example of this that hurts the consumer. microsoft? please, you can get a better OS for free if you want it. wal-mart? yeah i bet their cheap products really make your life awful. you are inventing problems that dont exist because you fear freedom and want free money from taxpayers for your cause.
you are talking about two industries where the rules are a very different than food production. music has to deal with draconian copyright and intellectual property problems. but the consumer wins in the end because you can (and i do) steal music anyways. cable tv and internet and crap like that is messed up horribly with government red tape and regulation. when al gore invented the internet they passed all sorts of laws that have slowed the progress and competition in these indutries. and untilities are obviously unique because of the need for massive infrastruture to sell the product. every company cant lay cables in your neighborhood. so the government makes various rules and generally screws things up in very complicated ways. but as a consumer, you arent really screwed that bad, it isnt like you dont have options (unless you live in an apartment like me that bans dishes), you get satellite, and you even have a couple companies to choose from there. i will concede that utilities like cable and gas and electric, these are unique and complicated because the competition doesnt work the same. but most consumer items like food and cars and such, they work best when freed from manipulation.
that is very very rare. and when it happens it is usually because of government interference with the market, not because of lack of it. in the time of standard oil and robberbarons and whatever, it weas easier to make a monopoly that wasnt so great for the consumer. now it is next to impossible without government help because our markets are global and everyone knows what is going on. example of an industry that doesnt have competition to you liking?
:rofl: There aren't present day examples because the government doesn't allow them to exist. Remember ATT? If Tyson had been allowed to a few years back, they would have bought up the entire poultry market. The only reason they didn't do it is because it was illegal, and even their dear friend Bubba Clinton couldn't do anything to help them out. But, if putting the cart before the horse makes you feel better, by all means carry on.
You know me, I won't argue that free market forces fix a bunch of stuff that government regulation screws up. The less government intrusion the better. I agree with you on Microsoft also.
even if tyson had done this (it wouldnt happen), you cant eat pork and steak for a few months until tyson realizes they are charging too much and losing money by the truckload? if you are selling something, you can ask more than market price if you want, but you are asking to bankrupt yourself. there are alternatives, and consumers will buy them instead of your product.
utilities is an industry that is really different. i honestly don't know or understand what is happening. they have all the rules where companies who want to invest in building infrastructure have to share access to their system to their competition and that sort of thing. i know that there is a perception out there that that huge telecommunications act of 1988 or whever it was, it was supposed to provide "fiber to the curb" for everyone and we would all have lighting quick access to the "information superhighway". but somewhere along the line something got funked up and i dont really get it.
The prrimary reason it's more difficult to make a monopoly is because of government interference, not free markets. Free markets are purely amoral. They reward the accumulation and application of power. The goal of competition is to beat the competion. If you have the power, you will use it to crush the competition. Capitalism needs the law to temper bad behavior. Some of the laws, i.e. government interference in your vernacular, were put in place because of the actions of the robber barrons. Trust me, without them, monopoly, or some form of colluding oligopoly, would be the end result in most cases. I have no specific examples in mind, but local discontinuities will exist, and since we are talking about global markets, local can be quite large. I ask again, what do you do when there is no competition?
Not if Tyson sets the market price for chicken wisely and still makes it attractive vs. the price of pork and beef. Oh yeah, they have their hands in both those markets as well. World largest as a matter of fact.
