Antityranicals wrote:1. Two things. "Buying up" requires a willing buyer as well as a willing seller. If the companies don't want to sell, they won't.
Yes, I’m sure this attitude will definitely encourage investors.
Secondly, even if they do sell out, in a real capitalist society, the moment people realize that they can get a ton of money by getting a huge company to buy their company, literally thousands of people will try this, and the large company will quickly find that they don't have enough money to forestall the invasion, and they will have competition
Laughably false. Firstly, any large corporation will only buy up the companies that they perceive they can extract revenue from, so any random Joe can’t go up and plead to be bought up. Secondly, even if you were right, because of the sheer imbalance in between the two sides, any small start-ups being bought out would be paid a pittance, nowhere near enough to bring down a large corporation.
2. Hardly. If we're talking about "planned obsolescence," that means that it's just as easy to build a product to last as to build a product not to last. Otherwise, the obsolescence wouldn't be planned, it would just happen.
Physically false. Planned obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so that it becomes obsolete (i.e., unfashionable, or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. It is easier and cheaper to build products this way-it does not mean that it is equally easy to build products with different lifespans.
And even if it would, the large companies would simply build better products to fight off the other companies.
‘People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices’
Either way, better products are the result.
Empirically false.
And the selling lightbulbs at a loss is principally the same thing as buying up small companies. Eventually, you run out of money. This tactic might work against one or a few companies, but not against hundreds, since new competitors will keep coming back.
Wrong. High entry costs and customer inertia will kill most small businesses entering into an already established field-especially manufacturing goods.
3. Only because the monopoly privileges bestowed on large companies by the government allowed them to cut quality without dealing with competition. Take away these privileges, and we'll have products which are both cheap and durable, because that's what the market will demand, and competitive free enterprise will provide. Stop saying that reality is capitalist, it isn't.
I don’t think you understand when planned obsolescence developed on any large scale.