> Why can't a company take the initiative and grab all the customers who value this?
You make it sounds so easy to start a tractor company.
You make it sounds so easy to start a tractor company.
Your comment reads like someone who believes there is a free market. I don't think most Americans realize lobbyist are the opposition and their sole purpose is to ensure a free market does not exist in their respective industry.
But yeah, many people that believe in this, thinks it's simple.
One example is my buddy who thinks automation is good and don't account the people who are displaced by it. When press for what he would do for these people. It took 20 minute for him to say: 1. charity 2. community 3. family to help those people. He also counter that because there's less worker due to automation their wages would rise. Articles have shown that their wages would do the opposite actually. But notice there is no government safety net for these people.
It's quite interesting.
If you want this free market, you want your country labor force to run at maximum. So in my opinion, free market people, should at least support some social safety net to transition these people into a new labor sector.
In general this free market thing isn't some law that came about from nature. It's a human invention... so the fear of having more laws or laws being abuse is crazy.
I am incline to believe these people are arm chair economists, just like myself, but with more faith in this mystical concept of free market.
Just two words, capital costs, suffice to throw that entire line of thought to the ground.
If you go through the long list of farming equipment companies, they're all gone now. Defunct, or conglomeration.
Caterpillar? In agriculture? Do you mean Challenger (AGCO) or CLAAS, both of whom have used Caterpillar branding at points in the past? Although neither of them have recently.
Curiously, you're the second person to have mentioned Caterpillar being involved in agriculture in this discussion. Which surprises me. They are not a player at all, outside of some overlap use of their industrial products (skidsteers, payloaders, etc.)
Agriculture is a broad market, not limited to plows and combines which are more specific and that's where JD is at. Like I said, not much overlap.
"Car company" and "rocket company" are interesting examples, since the "smart, passionate and dedicated entrepreneurs" in those areas needed billions in government subsidies to get off the ground []. And "computer company" includes the software side, with its low capital costs, and the hardware side, where the competitors are firmly entrenched (what's the last laptop/desktop upstart to hit it big?).
[] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-2015...
That is patently incorrect. There are many examples of market failures that produce incorrect, poor quality, or even predatory results. A recent example is the total disregard for security in many (most?) "IoT" products, and the market for lemons[1] is the canonical example of a market that specifically selects for bad results ("lemons"). Note that the latter example of markets not producing "better products" was worth a Nobel Prize.
In a truly free market, the product that is most efficient for the market wins. This is often (but not always) the most profitable product. Sometimes it may also be the "best" product, depending on your point of view, because profit (or price) is not the only metric that is used in determining which product is "best".
Economics isn't a great description of reality. Its a just so story that is made to make sense after the fact because it lacks the predictive power that defines science.
Messy, stupid, corrupt, emotional, irrational complicated is the rule as opposed to the exception in real life.
For instance no such animal as the free market you describe exists. Just because hard/impossible to repair tractors is a bad thing doesn't mean that anyone is inspired to fix this, that such a company would succeed in the fact of competition ethical and not so ethical.
The extremely probable failure of such an effort doesn't imply that the world wouldn't be a better place if this was so and so if this is important it falls on us as citizens to outline to the players what is acceptable and not via regulation.