this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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It's free market exploitation. If you believe a free market can exist without regulations, you're imbecile.
Just imagine: People need fridges. All fridge manufacturers agree to raise prices of a fridge by 2000%. So what, people are going to stop buying fridges? No - because they need them.
You would say: it's a free market, some new manufacturer is going to offer fridges at regular prices. Well - no you dumb fuck. What's the incentive for the new fridge manufacturer to sell at lower prices, when people are going to buy fridges anyway, because they need them? The answer is - none. It would be a dumb business decision, because your supply is limited, and you're going to sell it at market price, because that item is essential.
So how does the economy even work if that's possible? That's right idiot - because it's price fixing and it's fucking illegal.
The incentive here would be that a new company could sell far more fridges when reasonably prices compared to their competitors and take all of their market share
But yes of course govt regulation is required when there is actual price fixing going on. I'd also like to know the alternative way of pricing goods/services from people with the alternate view
Your goal as a company is not to sell as many, but to make the greatest profit. So let's say that the new market price is $3 000.
You're the new company. Your supply is 20 000.
Do you
a) Sell fridges @ $2 950/each, undercutting competition while selling whole supply, because of demand being higher than your supply, making $59 000 000?
or
b) Sell fridges at a reasonable price of $400, selling the same amount, because your supply is limited anyway, making $8 000 000?
The company still has no incentive to go B route. They only need to undercut the competition, not make prices reasonable.
Free market self regulates, provided nothing artificially screws with supply and demand and there are competitors. Both scalping and price fixing screws with it. It is literally the cancer of free market, and people screwing with it call themselves "investors", while actually destroying the economy.
It is the government's responsibility to prevent those situations before they happen, otherwise these changes may be irreversible.
Btw. A situation like this was happening recently in the GPU market. Nvidia had a crazy high demand for their GPUs because companies invested in AI were going to buy these cards no matter the price. So they bumped the prices like crazy, and they were instantly sold out.
Meanwhile Nvidia's competitor - AMD - didn't have nearly as strong GPUs for Ai as Nvidia. Do you think AMD's prices stayed the same? Nope. They bumped it just like Nvidia, barely undercutting them, because there was still demand, in fact growing demand, for GPUs for gaming, while AMD's supply was obviously limited.
2 years later, lower demand, GPUs actually in stock, but prices are still fucked (though not as much) because people got used to it.
I don't think you ever took even economics 101 in school because for almost all products there exists a price where you can actually increase your profits by decreasing the price because the larger sales volume offsets the revenue lost. Applies to your fridge example as well. You just assumed the same sales in both scenarios which is not even close to being realistic. And your Nvidia/AMD example ignores the high inflation seen during that period.
They are making the assumption that demand is constant because the product is a necessity (such as with something like insulin). Profit at higher volume and lower prices only happens with products with elastic demand.
In this example this new company would probably sell fridges at a whooping discount of some 5% and still be able to sell more although the price is 1990% of the original
The point being that if company A cuts their price to compete, and company B has an artificially inflated price
Now we have company B with no sales, and are forced to match or beat their competitor
Repeat until the price is fair. This breaks if both companies are co-ordinating with each other and forcing all other competition in line. But that's a crime and would be regulated