Economics: What a monopoly isn't.

[Fife]

[Fife]

[Fife]

Just for fun, check out another fine example of how profoundly stupid media discussions of "monopoly" and "collusion" really are.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/techno ... collusion/

People still read Popular Mechanics to make themselves feel super-cereal and very hi-info, I reckon. Sad.

[Fife]

From FEE:

A Government Guide to Keeping Insulin Unaffordable: 3 Easy Steps to Hogtie a Market
Desperate patients pay up because they have nowhere else to go—and their distress is deliberate and designed.

If you’ve heard anything about insulin lately, it’s probably been palpable outrage over soaring prescription prices or dubious optimism about Eli Lilly’s recent release of its new version that, at half the price, will cost an arm or a leg but not both.

Amid this cesspool of indignant commentary, you’re likely to hear one of the biggest misconceptions around: that markets, competition, or capitalism have failed to respond to the patient's need in creating more affordable insulin. What you won’t hear is how pharma giants have enlisted the FDA, the DEA, the FBI, customs and border security, and a dozen other taxpayer-funded regulatory and enforcement agencies to protect their profit margins.

If anything, the draconian constraints demonstrate just how diligently market competition brings down prices and how hamstrung and hogtied competition must be before it stops performing its essential functions.

When studying markets, economists like to imagine hypothetical “perfect competition,” the economic equivalent of physics’ frictionless plane. In perfect competition, many suppliers and demanders exchange the same product, buyers and sellers can find each other and switch products without added cost, and no barriers prevent new suppliers from entering the market to offer equivalent goods. If a perfect competition market is the hypothetical free-market heaven, the American insulin market is literal hell.

. . .
Step 1: Limit the Number of Suppliers
. . .
Step 2: Exclude Competing Products
. . .
Step 3: Hide and Distort Prices so No One Can Shop Around
. . .

Through this nebulous network of bully tactics and insider dealings, government agencies and corporate campaign donors conspire to deny patients the benefits of market competition. Desperate patients pay up because they have nowhere else to go—and their distress is deliberate and designed.

[nmoore63]

Just for fun, check out another fine example of how profoundly stupid media discussions of "monopoly" and "collusion" really are.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/techno ... collusion/

People still read Popular Mechanics to make themselves feel super-cereal and very hi-info, I reckon. Sad.

In conclusion, internet raises prices and hurts the consumer.

[Fife]

Yeah, we really just need the FTC computer watching over the Amazon and Walmart computers, eh? Keep everything nice and honest.

It's really astounding how economically illiterate Journalismists really are.

[nmoore63]

Yeah, we really just need the FTC computer watching over the Amazon and Walmart computers, eh? Keep everything nice and honest.

It's really astounding how economically illiterate Journalismists really are.

Government please save me from the terrible price gouging internet!

[Fife]

Bernie's gonna get us free insulin and free hi-speed internet with Netflix/CNN unlimited service.

Fuck that puny bag. Bernie's gonna put it all on my EBT card. Death to Monopolies!!

[Speaker to Animals]

Your fallacy today is called the red herring.

[nmoore63]

Bernie's gonna get us free insulin and free hi-speed internet with Netflix/CNN unlimited service.

Fuck that puny bag. Bernie's gonna put it all on my EBT card. Death to Monopolies!!