Stories like that illustrate why there so much more to "marketing" than the simplistic Adam Smith model the Right is always trying to market to us. They would have us believe hard working entrepreneurs innovate and cut costs to the bone to bring the consumer the best possible product at the lowest possible price, and that cutthroat competition between producers keeps everybody honest. Well maybe that happens between two taco stands across the street from each other, but it's not quite that simple in the real world.

Consider another example from Big Pharma. The big money now is in maintenance meds like blood pressure or cholesterol medications that have to be taken for years in order to keep the patient healthy--and paying. This is where the big research effort is going now, because these drugs result in long-term sales and profits. The result is that development of other drugs such as new antibiotics to replace those which have been rendered obsolete by over-prescription by doctors (because microbes have evolved a resistance to them) is suffering from neglect. In spite of new, antibiotic-resistant infections on a rampage in hospitals, the big research effort is into ever more duplicates of already effective maintenance meds for chronic systemic diseases. With an anti-bacterial, profits are limited, because the patient is usually either cured or dead after a relatively brief treatment regimen.

Of course, it isn't just Big Pharma, every industry and every market has local conditions and idiosyncrasies, hidden synergies and interactions, that require similar quantum strategies to ensure profitablility over and above the classical supply and demand model the conservatives would have us believe rules the busines universe. But as in physics, it isn't so much that the Newtonian system is wrong, (it is an excellent first approximation to reality and works in many simple scenarios) as that the relativistic approach is required to fully describe market behavior on really large scales. It's why they have college courses and degrees in marketing, and even specializations for specific industries. Entrepreneurial excellence and competitive innovation aren't enough, you still need to know how to game the system. In fact, you can't survive by just putting out a good product at a good price (unless, of course, you sell tacos).

You would think that conservatives, who spend so much time waxing about the glories of capitalism and presumably understand it so well, do not mention any of these considerations when conducting their impassioned defenses of the free market. These effects pose a threat and a danger to the effectiveness of capitalism, lead to market instabilities and contradictions, and are harmful to genuine entrepreneurs and innovators in commerce, not to mention the consumer, the stockholder, and the employee. It's not like our conservative friends are not aware these things happen, a lot of them have advanced degrees in business, they know exactly what is going on, they just are counting on us not finding out, and they have enough contempt for the rest of us to believe we can't figure it out on our own. Ever read the financial columns and the stock market press? You would think it was indeed a real market of fiercely competitive individual entrepreneurs, when what you really have is non-productive parasitic organisms selling each other IOUs, printing worthless securities, smoke and mirrors, "instruments" and "derivatives", and they're not the kind you use in calculus, either.