Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iku Rex" data-source="post: 5886373" data-attributes="member: 752">How is this relevant to what I wrote?People are finding online shopping cheap and convenient. Both with regards to paper books and ebooks. You would expect some brick and mortar stores to disappear. This is a normal and desirable outcome. The alternative is keeping employees and businesses around doing make-work. Regardless, it has very little do do with whether or not Amazon has or will get an unbreakable  monopoly.Cite?At least you now agree that, contrary to your earlier claim, new comic book publishers have indeed entered and stayed in the market. Wasn't the whole point to get rid of all competition to achieve monopoly pricing? Even if Marvel and DC weren't competing companies - which they are - they still wouldn't have succeeded. I think you need to look elsewhere to explain Marvel and DCs dominance.And you still haven't explained how consumers suffered. (Provided you even care.)And how do the consumers suffer? Are they not free to choose?I also note that, once again, you achieve your «monopoly» by grouping two rival corporations and completely disregarding smaller competitors. I don't think that word means what you think it does...How is this relevant? Your claim was that the publisher was unable to charge higher prices. EDC, the dead tree publisher “will no longer sell any of its books on Amazon or to any entities that resell to Amazon” (cite <a href="http://www.edcpub.com/news.aspx?Story=83" target="_blank">Educational Development Corporation: EDC News</a> ) . IPG, which I was primarily talking about in the above quote, chose not to make a deal with Amazon and Amazon no longer sells its titles.And yet Amazon hasn't become the sole outlet, and has no real chance of becoming one. Much less permanently so. Once again your hypothesis falls through.(And «classic monopsonistic predatory pricing»? There's no such thing.)Oh noes, consumers are paying low prices! Quick, someone call the government to put and end to the horror!What is an «artificially low price»? If Amazon thinks a greater market share will get it greater profits in the long run, it makes sense to sacrifice some profit now. There's nothing «artificial» about that. It's not much different from, say, spending money on customer service. And every competitor is free to try the same thing.(That was the sales of an IPG client. But I don't mind using that number for the sake of argument.)Let me remind you of the conversation so far: You were wrong.  Instead of admitting that, you've moved the goalpost, and seem to actually be demanding that IPG's sales should remain exactly the same even though their prices are up and they refuse to cut a deal with a large popular outlet. It's simply absurd.Oh, please. Now you're bringing US welfare politics into it... If the rules for welfare programs don't work, the solution is to change those rules, not singling out certain businesses for attack.It certainly has nothing to do with whether or not Walmart is a harmful monopoly. If there really is a problem with government assistance programs and Walmart employees, the same problem would remain if Walmart had a single store, or even a tiny mom and pop grocery store with a poorly paid store clerk.Untrue. You've admitted as much yourself. And again, if the idea is to spend money in the short term in order to secure a long term advantage, it clearly isn't working. It's a sisyphean task. Times change. As I recall Marvel and DC haven't exactly been raking it in every year since their founding either. But they have advantages that have nothing to do with the monopoly bogeyman. And even when your group them together they aren't close to a monopoly!What reason do you think that is? Or are you just using a variant of the appeal to law fallacy? («The law says X. Politicians would never ever make a mistake, so X must be correct.»)But, there is indeed a reason why so-called «predatory pricing» is illegal. It's part ignorance among politicians, and part clever manipulation by businesses that can't compete fairly.“Dinged along the road”? Sounds to me like they got to have their cake and eat it too, if Saudi Arabia picked up the slack. That might make sense if Saudi Arabia was using OPEC as a political tool, but not so much if they just wanted profits. Like I said (and you pretended not to notice), OPEC is a government-run organization. Many of OPEC's decisions were based on politics, not economics.  As for the “price manipulation”, OPECs main (failed) goal has been to maintain a stable price. They tried (and, I suppose, try) to do that by increasing or decreasing the supply. Considering that oil is not a renewable resource, it is by no means a given that emptying every well as quickly as possible is the ideal approach for the consumers and the world economy. In some ways OPEC has just been doing what individual suppliers would have done, and are doing, anyway: adjusting supply to demand. I'd call this the appeal to law fallacy again, but you actually admit that Microsoft was not deemed a monopoly! I guess in your world-view, an accusation is proof enough.As for the law, the only reason Microsoft could even come close to being called a monopoly was by defining the “market” extremely narrowly.What? I have no idea where you're going with this. I was talking about Linux. You know, one of Microsoft competitors, disproving the silly claim that Microsoft has or had total control of the market. And then you bring in Apple, another powerful Microsoft competitor, illustrating further that Microsoft neither had nor has a monopoly. Oh, for...Those are competing companies. The words you're throwing around have no real meaning when any arbitrary selection of competing companies can be declared to be a unified group. Also, there are more than four large car manufacturers in the world.  What you're describing is fraud. And I think it's largely a fabricated conspiracy theory that makes very little economic sense for the companies involved.Cite? You really don't get that when car production drops or ends, so does the production of car parts?There is nothing inherently harmful about a business choosing to offer its services to a single other business. It only becomes a potential problem when not doing so is impossible. That is not the case here.Really?So, Amazon's market share is not 80%, and falling rapidly. How very peculiar. It's almost as if this “unstoppable monopolist” conspiracy theory isn't true, isn't it?</blockquote>

Verification