you mean at a price where people still want to buy it? oh how terrible it must be for the consumers. if they set the price where people can still afford it and are buying it all the time, then where is the problem? you should buy stock in tyson yourself, it sounds to me like they have the right idea.
The key is its food, people will still have to buy it. But no, there are substitutes. Well, if all the substitutes fall under the same corporate umbrella....well.....you can just use that active imagination of yours to figure that one out.
in a time when there is one railroad across the country and our only choices to buy tomatoes are our next-door neighbor or his friend, that was a different time. now the earth is our market. if we are idiots and we can only afford one printing press or refinery in the world, that would be different. the markets were different 100 years ago. because.... exactly. try and corner a global market and you run into problems. somebody will not cooperate. the only real monopoly i can think of now is that diamond cartel, debeers. and i am not too concerned, because anyone who wants to buy a diamond deserves to be beaten up anyway. i guess i dont buy the overpriced product. i dont need that much.
dang man, pay attention. not everyone wants to collude to raise prices if they can make huge profits selling a monster volume because their competitors are trying to "fix" the prices. lets say tyson does whatever you said. some guy who likes money and some investors are gonna team up to make their own chicken business, because their is a gaping hole in the market for them to fill where there are massive profits to be made. lets say it costs X to produce chicken. and tyson wants to take over the market and collude and sell the chicken for 4X. do you see how this allows anyone else to make a massive amount of money selling scads of chicken for 2.5X? also, like i said, if chicken gets out of control, they lose market share to beef and people are eating beef stew instead of chicken pot pie, so they lose market share. they dont want prices to be so high that people are not buying anymore. i know you said tyson owns beef and everything else too. i guess they own the universe.
the problem is because at&t's child company, bellsouth laid all of the infrastructure here. they don't have to resell it to anyone unless the government tells them to... cause they built it, yunno? end result? monopoly. i must buy phone service from bellsouth and pay whatever price they want me to pay cause there ain't no alternative. this is where the government intervention must come in and protect me from paying whatever charge bellsouth wants me to pay for phone service. same thing with cox. there is only one cable company here in little ole baton rouge cause they own the infrastructure and the government hasn't told them to open it up. end result? i have one cable choice even if i hate their tech support, service, and prices. of course there are all of these different phone services now through vonage, packet8, bellsouth, cox, etc. problem with those being 2 of the 4 require some external internet access which is of course only obtainable through the big 2 (both of whom suck). it's a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils.
1. like i said, there is all sorts of fancy goings-on with telecommunications. utilities are unique. 2. in my case, i dont give a damn, people still have land-lines? i havent had one in years. if i wanted one, i would use voip. it is complicated with utilities. my advice: directtv. the dish network. steal your favorite shows from the interweb. i already conceded that i dont understand how the market is working with utlilies and telecommunications because it is very complicated, and the situation is unique.
voip sucks because the isps are down way more often than standard landlines go down. also 911 support is spotty... or at least it was. the situation down here in little ol br is also probably a lot different from your neck of the woods. cell phones simply don't work everywhere down here in the swamp. suck, suck, sometimes i can get the latest desperate housewives 3 days after the fact.. and thats IF the newsgroups and all of hte various torrent sites could get there sh1t together. satellites' feed of local channels is on par with rabbit ears. the super bowl was horrifying on directTV. but it goes against your mantra that government intervention is bad all of the time. it is clearly necessary for it to prevent these ****ty ass companies from raping us for bad service.
you dont have to start a new company, existing companies can just refuse to join tyson and rake in the profits when they raise prices (which they wont do because of the reasons i mentioned). there is a price at which products make the most money. and it isnt just the highest price they can get a couple rich peeps to pay. they want to sell lots of chicken to lots of people, so they will keep the price at a point we can actually afford. from your example, it sounds like an american farm company is making a lot of money. i guess some farms don't need your precious subsidies.
