Current Events — HabitableZone

Current Events » in reply to I think the logical outcome of your argument

Interesting...
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Competition is great at keeping prices down and figuring out clever ways to deliver less, charge more, and get customers to continue to buy the product anyway. Another major pastime of competitors is to remove their competition. When you can remove your competitors you can do a much better job of delivering less, charging more, while keeping your customers.

Really?

Going through this thread again, I can't get over how it seems to be a fundamental idea among many people that those who are in business are, by definition, universally criminals, or at the very least unscrupulous and eager to cheat their customers.

Nothing in my personal experience of working for small companies, large companies, and entrepreneurial startups has left me with this bizarre impression. I worked on office products, food products, and others. In every case, the objective we were given was to produce something of surpassing quality, as inexpensively and efficiently as possible. In every case, quality was top priority. Each company had many competitors, and the reputation of the brand name was something that was valued.

Just sitting in this chair, I can look around me and see dozens of products, simple and complex, each of which does its job superbly, and which I bought for a reasonable price. In my daily life, I see and deal with hundreds more.

Where do you go to learn the idea that the private sector is unredeemably evil, and only the glorious State can keep them from destroying us all? Obviously, I must have missed out on the process.

A lot of you, who are otherwise quite intelligent, don't seem to have a ghost of a clue what the fundamentals of capitalism are, how it works, how competition functions, or anything else. I rarely see any presentation of the process that rises above the level of a Monopoly game, or beyond a single tier of analysis. I'm beginning to think it's a bloody miracle we haven't collapsed into pure socialism years ago.

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