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Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? If you mean the first, then yes I think no one really wants to live in that world, but also that is not what is at stake in this SCOTUS decision. The latter statement is what is at stake, and I think many people would want to live in that world if they could actually experience it. I wrote this comment in last week's thread. There are serious and fundamental problems with centralized bureaucracy. The kind of problems that constitutional amendments don't fix.
There are three serious alternative to centralized regulation by a bureaucracy:
What if the biggest companies collude with each other to not police each other but to instead, use their hegemonic position in the market to crush any upstart rival that attempts to offer the public an actually superior product? For example, by using economies of scale to undersell any such rival long enough to put them out of business. Or by negotiating monopolistic deals with important suppliers so that no competitor actually can build their product at scale to begin with?
The same thing that happens with most market inefficiencies, they will get plugged by entrepreneurs trying to make money, or the inefficiencies are too small and no one will bother.
Company collusions were often regularly attempted and failed prior to when they were made illegal. It's a prisoners dilemma where new prisoners can show up and defect.
There is a fun way to deal with producers that sell beneath their own production costs: buy all of their products, put them out of business, and then resell the products you bought for profit.
The only sustainable way to "undersell" is to actually just make the products at lower cost. At which point it's just inefficient producers being sour grapes because they are losing.
Why do the suppliers want to limit their customer base just to help out another company? In that case compete with the suppliers, since they are strangely operating like charities rather than businesses.
This only works in a world where contracts and lawyers don’t exist. Like, it’s often illegal to “buy another producers products and resell them yourself” in at least three ways.
It's called retail usually. And who is making it illegal? A centralized bureaucracy probably. Which is the thing I'm arguing against in the first place. It's a little awkward when the thing that is supposed to be stopping the problem is actually just preventing it from being fixed in the first place.
Buying someone else's products retail in a store will let you get a couple of them, but not enough to be profitable to resell. In order to get enough of them that you can resell them, you have to make a purchase from a wholesaler aor from the company itself and those purchases aren't going to be "walk into a store", they will come with contracts and the contracts can forbid reselling below a certain price.
Furthermore, even if you could buy the company's products below cost and resell them somewhat less below cost, you'd still be competing with the company, who's directly selling their products below cost, so it wouldn't work.
You misunderstood, I'm saying retail already does the thing where they buy someone else's product and resell it. The comment I responded to said that was illegal, which must be news to most Amazon sellers.
Also I mentioned elsewhere if you don't ha e the capital you just have to make the market is aware that the good is being undersold. The more undersold it it the better an investment it is to get it now. The less undersold it is, the less you are being pushed out as competition.
Turns out the optimal amount of underselling is at production cost which to me just sounds indistinguishable from competition. So we have people complaining that market competition doesn't work, and they point to market competition as their example.
You can do it in small quantities that aren't enough to cause a problem for the big company, so Amazon sellers don't disprove anything. You can't do it in large enough quantities that it makes a significant dent in the big company's ability to weaponize selling below cost.
How are you going to invest in it? You can't buy large quantities of the product under production cost because of the factors described above. And you can't invest in competitors because if the big company can keep this up long enough to drive competitors out of the market, investing in competitors won't gain you anything.
You keep seeing low price products as some kind of problem. They aren't. They are an opportunity to for individuals and others to profit off of that company's mistake.
I brought up playstations elsewhere. Sony was competing with Microsoft in the game console market. The Playstation ended up being sold way below production costs. It gave Sony some advantage in the market share in that market, and there were knock on benefits for them having more consoles out there so they were sorta willing to eat the loss.
But microsoft is in the computing industry in general. Sony ended up taking way more of a loss because the playstation could be converted into a computing platform, and it was way underpriced relative to its capabilities. Server farms started hilariously looking like rows and rows of popped open playstations sitting on racks.
You ask how I'm going to profit of some item being undersold. The answer is that it probably depends on the item. For some things this is simple. The penny costs more than a penny worth of metal to make. If it wasn't illegal people would probably be melting down pennies (they might be doing it anyways).
For some assembled items the answer is "break it down and reuse the most expensive parts".
For some items it might be "find new uses for it now that it is much cheaper". This happens in food markets commonly where you popularize new recipes to take advantage of cheap foods. McDonalds supposedly does this with the McRib, waiting until pork prices are low to sell it.
It is dangerous to be a company selling their product below production costs. Because people might start finding a way to exploit those resources. It doesn't have to be a competitor. If you are a competitor you have an extra incentive to help people find those ways to exploit the competitor's resources. There is obviously no evidence of it, but someone smart at microsoft could have easily figured out "Hey the playstation is selling computation for way under production costs, we know this because we know exactly how much computation costs. How about we go spread that news around in a bunch of trade magazines, or ask some newspapers to run stories about how people are using playstations for cheap server farms."
There is also often this built in assumption among anti-market perspectives that the competitor trying to enter the market will always have to be some poor wily entrepreneur. This is often not the case. Its usually massive corporations expanding into another area. The Sony/Microsoft with Playstation/Xbox is a good example. WalMart's main competitor is Amazon. Apple competes heavily with Google/android in the smartphone market. Pepsi vs Coke. Etc etc.
Answer me this: what should a large company with an advantage in slightly cheaper production do? Because to me it seems like anti-market people will be unhappy no matter what. If they leave the price the same, then they get called greedy for not lowering their prices when they can afford to and charging way more than the product cost to make. If they do lower their prices they get accused of predatory pricing. If they ironically raise their prices, then they go out of business, and are replaced by smarter people that have to pick between one of the other two options (or if they successfully raise their prices, then people accuse them of successfully executing the predatory pricing strategy).
Ultimately the correct answer seems to be "invest in politicians so you don't get fucked over in Washington by one of your competitors sending a which hunt after you". Which is why I have a problem with centralized regulatory bureaucracy.
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