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Standard was "slashing" prices because they could afford to offer better prices. It's called competition.


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The lower prices were combined with collusion with the railroads to charge competitors higher rates, to make competitor's businesses unprofitable. Because standard oil was selling cheap, Standard's competitors couldn't sell their oil in at high enough prices to pay to ship oil at the railroad's marked up rates, and this made them more susceptible to being bought out.

Even if you think that Standard oil had good intentions. Are you really trying to advocate that we allow monopolization of markets to occur, so that we can rely on the perpetual good will of these profit driven companies? Wouldn't shareholders / takeover specalists vote out any warm-hearted CEO once the oil market had been completely monopolized?

Why do you think OPEC exists? De Beers? Because they aren't US companies governed by US antitrust law, they limit supply of oil, diamonds, etc, to artifically inflate prices by limiting supply.


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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.?


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My point was never that cheap foreign labor doesn't sometimes make goods cheaper. Its that it doesn't have to. What forces price towards marginal cost is competition. So yes ghetto walmart goods get cheaper because everyone is capable of producing them.

But how about Microsoft which uses Indian customer support personnel, Indian programmers, etc. Who competes with it? It gets to set the monopoly price on its software, the lower costs are translated into shareholder profits, but employees lose jobs.

Once you realize that no market for a company's good is perfectly competitive you begin to realize that not all costs savings will be translated into lower prices, they are quite capable of going to the company's owners instead. Price = marginal cost, only in a perfectly competitive model. But you seem to know some economics, so you know perfect competition in real world seldom exists. After you realize that, it doesn't necessarily follow that working class american's are better off from "lower cost goods" because they may have lost more from having to take the next best job.

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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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I'm not ignoring it. I said that I am Pro-free trade. Free trade is a NET win-win for both countries. Just because I think we should look at how wealth created by free trade is distributed in this country, doesn't mean I'm against it. I think your visualizing me as some hippie WTO protestor, i'm not.