Ironically for a question about antitrust price fixing you just named two incumbent government-sanctioned cartels (zoning and taxi medallions) that restrict supply and keep prices high. They would be illegal if private companies made them.
> They would be illegal if private companies made them.
A lot of things governments do would be illegal if private companies did them. Are you arguing that governments shouldn't have special abilities that companies can't have? Should every road be owned by a company? Should the police report to Amazon instead of the local municipality where you may actually have a say in how they are run?
We give governments additional powers because they, at least nominally, answer to citizens and society. Companies have no such responsibility.
I’m saying that government regulations that fix prices should be scrutinized and repealed if they reduce opportunity for ordinary people. Such as zoning codes that price out the poor.
I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.
Obviously that's easier said than done, and SV has a track record of "ask forgiveness not permission" as a successful tactic for effecting policy change. But many times it results in indefinite undermining of government which leads to selective enforcement and cartels, which is worthy of criticism (of both government and VC-powered undermining of government).
> I believe the argument here is that the way to do that isn't by establishing a private business that flaunts and undermines those government regulations, but by changing the policies through government process.
And to make those who interfaced with the prior system in good faith whole again; eg: drivers who bought taxi medallions for six figures USD, only to have the value of the medallion plummet with the arrive of "rideshare" services.
To make beneficiaries whole is perhaps the worst reason to keep a monopolistic system. In the case of taxi medallions in San Francisco, they are technically still owned by the city and the medallion should never have had any private value to begin with; Mayor Gavin Newsom should have leased them to the drivers instead of creating a $250,000 transfer program to give windfalls to retirees. In the case of zoning, ideally we would tax much of the land rent to reduce the incentive to exclude and increase the incentive to create capital. Rents from a government-created monopoly should not be anyone’s ticket to retirement.
> They would be illegal if private companies made them.
Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies. Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?
> Yes, that's kind of the main difference between government functions and private companies
Perhaps that should change. Or at least it’s a reason to scrutinize and repeal laws that are used for price fixing.
> Are you saying the very idea of zoning strikes you as a problem? Or are you trying to call out the bad implementations which strangle urban prosperity in the US?
Zoning Rules! by William Fischel gives good a history of zoning. Zoning was originally for segregation within the city but to the question of prices, no it was not inherently problematic. It was not until the 1970s that zoning was used for growth control to make entire cities unaffordable.
That's not ironic. Governments and private companies are not the same kind of entities. They have different roles, different roots of legitimacy, different forms of accountability, different operational objectives, and carry different expectations.
It’s ironic that in response to a question about price fixing, failuser brought up other companies that were formed to circumvent government price fixing, and in his examples the governments doing the price fixing were supposedly the good guys!
In the case of Uber, they successfully broke up the taxi cartel since the state PUC ruled that ride hail is a separate category.
In the case of Airbnb, according to their founding story they were created to help economize on space because rents were high in San Francisco due to zoning. Although they made a useful service, they did not succeed in reducing rents because the underlying zoning is still the constraint that keeps rents high.
The problem with that is thanks to many years of below cost pricing Uber has become synonymous with taxi now, and most people don’t even realize (or care) that taxis are often cheaper.
Uber is not seen as synonymous to taxi, its seen as better; more convenient (one app for any city), less fraudulent, and more safe. Uber more readily kicks drivers off the platform (for better or for worse)
Many things a government does would be illegal if private companies did them. For example, prison, the draft, and taxes. The government is allowed to do it because we (as a society) believe it's better for the government to do these things than private individuals or companies.
Can you give examples of the topic at hand, price fixing, that are justified? There are a handful of progressive forms of price fixing (e.g. minimum wage laws), but many others should be added to the Niskanen Center’s list of bad regulations in the Captured Economy.
Utilities that trend towards natural monopolies due to high barriers to entry like water and electricity infrastructure are often run by the government or heavily regulated because pricing would be extortionate if the market were allowed to set prices.
Fair enough, utility regulations fix prices except in the opposite direction. Without zoning, landowners could not act as a cartel since that would violate antitrust laws, whereas without utility regulation, a natural monopoly could set prices as high as the market will bear.
Yep, basic human rights are priceless, and by capitalist mechanics, their pricing will always converge at "how much can we get away with in the current economy?" Government oversight is the only way we currently have to manage this somewhat.
As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.
> As an example in support of this, healthcare is barely price-regulated and hardly run by the government in America, and is thus extortionate.
They are supply-regulated by governments. According to Niskanen Center, the high cost of health care is due to the American Medical Association limiting new accredited medical schools and certificate-of-need laws limiting new hospitals. https://www.niskanencenter.org/faster_fairer/liberating_the_...
"Named after William A. Niskanen, an economic adviser to Ronald Reagan, it states that its "main audience is Washington insiders", and characterizes itself as moderate."
Barf. These seem like very erudite reasons when really the issue is running healthcare as a balkanized private system with opaque pricing information that patients often don't see until after they receive care is fundamentally an inefficient system. The government could run a single payer system at a loss and it would be cheaper than what we have now.
You have heard of the Prison Indistrial Complex right? Our Prisons have been For-Profit for a long time now. Totally legal, government sanctioned privatized penitentiaries.
Yes, I have. Perhaps I should have made clear that putting people in prison was the thing that was illegal for private companies, not operating a prison.
