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Comment by yndoendo | Hacker News Reader

Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers. This is not just in the food industry it is also in retail such as Amazon.

Companies like Kroger are so big they dictate the purchase prices from farms. The farmers were better off in the past with multiple competitors creating a bidding war. Same with consumers, products had to be priced right to win their business.

A company I work for had to give free engineering labor in millions of dollars to get access to one of the largest retailers in the USA. Too big not-to-do-business-with harms everyone except the retailer.

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> Bigger the company the more power they have to dictate the purchasing price from producers and the cost for consumers.

That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today. The US just stopped enforcing the law (and also anti-trust laws that would have protected local/small businesses) so here we are. At any point the US could decide that enough is enough and fix the situation but we'd probably have to make it actually illegal for corporations to bribe government officials before it stands a chance of happening.

It used to be illegal to bribe. Used to... Make a law impossible to enforce, and you suddenly transform the act to a totally legal one, at the expense of people losing trust in the system (specifically the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress). And at some point, the system breaks.

> That wasn't always true. The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal

"Legality" has never stopped big companies from doing these things. Google, Apple, Meta, etc has been receiving fines all day long and they still continue what they do.

I imagine a world sometimes where punitive measures reflect the scope of crimes. If steal from a person is 1 year, then stealing from 1000 is 10 years and from a million is a lifetime. That’d put the end to political shenanigans, in my imagination.

Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company, fined a thousand bucks for every native rock drawing they destroy? They counted them up, paid the fine, and blasted a road through. All gone.

Fines becomes a business calculation. Not a deterrent, not if it matters to the big corporation. Which at some scale, it will become cost-effective.

> Fines don't scale. The Australian mining company

There's the problem. Australia doesn't scale... not the fines.

In Australia, there are a lot of rules, a lot of fines but not much to gain.

Is this a specific jab at something? I don't understand you comment, please elaborate.

A "fine" or "tax" is not necessarly regulation, in that it can be avoided, as in paid for by other actions, or gamed. Regulation should be though of as an input to cause a result in a scenario. Work backwards from the desired result, accounting for gaming the system, to attempt a regulation action. Of course, politicians are motivated only to provide something, not to make it effective.

Fines should be percentage of stock price. Applied to the owners of stock. Next time there is dividend or stock is transacted fine is collected. Still limits the liability to price of stock, but fully incentives stock owners to make sure the leadership will do their best to avoid fines.

I once saw a meme of a quote somewhere that said "if the only penalty for a crime is a fine, then it's only a deterrent for poor people" or something to that effect.

I suppose it scales upward infinitely.

That's why, in Finland, the income of the offender is used to determine the fine (including for speeding). The largest fines for speeding are over 100.€. This is a very effective way to deter the bad behavior by rich people.

Our legal system would rather do just about anything than bring companies to court. Unless they're, like, giving people HIV. And even then it's reluctant.

As someone proposed on here, instead of fines, punishment should be a percentage government ownership stake. This serves to 1. dilute the shares, punishing the people who can affect change (the shareholders) and 2. Put the government on the inside, a major pain in the ass and a stronger position for the government to know when, prevent, and/or punish these things in the future.

An irredeemable company/ownership will ultimately lose control over time.

>The Robinson-Patman Act made it illegal to give preferential treatment to large retailers specifically in order to prevent what we're seeing with walmart and amazon today.

Price collusion is illegal too, but happens all the time. There being a law for it just makes the rare fine a cost of doing business.

Not if the penalty is severe enough. Mass murder is also illegal and we make sure we don't have repeat offenders.

I wish that were true, but mass murderers like Johnson & Johnson, DuPont, Philip Morris, the Sackler family, etc. are allowed to keep on killing people and face no meaningful consequences for the deaths they cause. With enough money you can be a serial killer for decades and get away with it.

If money is people (as per the Citizens United vs. FEC decision of 2010), meaning that companies can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections since restrictions "cannot" be imposed on individuals like humans and companies), then surely things like incarceration and the death penalty should also be an option for serious offenders.

Corporate punishments can be applied on a fine grain. Every store, every instance, every choice becoming a 10k fine can rapidly make even relatively rare acts untenable as a cost of doing business.

There's too many people here voting against regulation and enforcement, to their own detriment. They have no idea what they're actually doing, they're just run on propaganda from the greedy.

Cigarette companies (no surprise) are known to do a similar type of price fixing, although in their case it's targeting high-income shoppers for lack of discounts.

Noticed it a while locally, and national data agrees. If you want to shop for cigarettes, shop in low income, minority areas. [1] Cigarette companies specifically target stores with regular, habitual, high-income smokers for high prices and lack of discounts, while offering significant bargains in stores less than a mile away. [2]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6689253/

[2] https://truthinitiative.org/research-resources/tobacco-indus...

But Robert Bork and the Chicago School of Economics and Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party assured me that mergers and trusts were good for me! Look, the companies even have self-serving rationalizations scribbled with crayons on butcher paper saying the same thing!

Seriously, though: I cannot believe how high and how far these utterly dogshit arguments flew without pushback and the amount of damage that consolidation has done to the American Experiment. The best time to get a Lina Khan in the FTC was 40 years ago but the second best time was 4 years ago. I just hope the next president picks up the project... though I'm sure the (by then) trillionaires will do everything in their power to stop that from happening.

Not to mention the number of ordinary people who still parrot the utter dogshit arguments to this day despite being actively harmed by them

It's crazy the fan fiction we have allowed to be recon'd into being 'Capitalism' when Capitalist thinkers thought that rent seekers/monopolies were destructive to Capitalist, and that strong government oversight was key part of a strong Capitalist system.

My choice now is to give every excess penny I have to food or starve to death.

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