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Old 02-04-2007, 06:19 PM
BCPVP BCPVP is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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Default Re: A Problem I See With Pure Capitalism

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Standard Oil was slashing prices to drive competitors out of business.

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Standard was "slashing" prices because they could afford to offer better prices. It's called competition. An article by John McGee dispelled the myth of predatory pricing by Standard Oil, if you care to read up on the subject.

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It made deals with railroads to charge competitors higher rates, so that they couldn't effectively transport oil from their fields

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I think you meant that Standard made rebate deals with railroads so that they were charged less. But so what? Railroads have high fixed costs and low variable costs. The railroad just needs to cover its variable costs to be profitable. So the more business, the better. Standard gave the railroads heavy traffic, which is what they wanted. Should railroads not have the right to determine what they charge? Should Standard not have had the right to bargain over those rates?

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That is, why standard oil was broken up. Sure low prices were nice, but we know it was part of a scheme to monopolize the oil industry. Although a large conglomerate-monopolist is capable of producing more efficiently through economies of scale, anyone who has taken any economics will tell you it has no economic incentive to do so. Its not cost that determines price, but demand.

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Standard was broken up because of emotion-driven arguments and poor economics that believe "perfect competition" is something that could ever be acheived. Standard had ~90% of the market around 1890. By the time of its anti-trust trial, it had about ~66%. Also, the standardy theory of how a monopoly works would be it reducing output and raising prices, but that never happened during Standard's history. So clearly fears of monopolization were not the reason.

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Thus, when they relocate its not consumers (and certainly not the laid off employees), but company owners and wealthy investors that benefit.

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You never answered my question about WalMart's prices. Would they be less than, equal to, or greater than the current prices if all of WalMart's goods were made in the U.S.?

You're also ignoring the benefit these companies have on the local economies that they exist in. People wouldn't be leaving their subsistence (or worse) farming jobs for these factories if they didn't offer a better life.
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