Comment by s0l1dsnak3123
3 years ago
Once again the "market" is abusing everyone in the pursuit of endless economic growth. Our economic system forces successful businesses into enemies of the consumer once they can't keep momentum.
Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, this creates a phenomenon where helpless consumers are held at ransom: the ultimatum being that they either continue to be exploited in ever more devious ways, or to simply do without. Small businesses that spring up to fulfill the void are bought up quickly in order to squash any hope of real competition.
This is not an economy that works for ordinary people. Ordinary people does include temporarily embarrassed millionaires (and real millionaires, and startups and micro-businesses for that matter) on Hacker News.
The only people who are benefiting overall from these practices are major shareholders and those chasing endless quarterly growth targets.
Uh... Pretty sure the printer industry is holding literally no one hostage. As mentioned in several comments—this industry is dead.
My point is a general one - the printer market is doing exactly what all elastic markets do.
It's what they do if there is not a healthy market with lots of innovation and competition. It is a dieing (of maybe stagnant and on the decline) market where the few remaining are squeezing out the last remaining drops of revenue.
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Well, without hyper-focusing on printers, I fail to see the call to action here. I don't understand why "this is not an economy that works for ordinary people".
I consider myself pretty ordinary and my life is impacted almost 0 by the forces of elastic markets.
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It isn't dead. I use my printer now more than ever for printing postage labels.
Will home printer usage decline? Probably yes, but just like I have a home phone that I barely use, people will probably keep a printer around just in case.
> Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy,
There is no “monopoly” in the printer industry and it’s definitely not holding the economy “hostage”.
We do not need the government to break up “Big Printer”.
Capitalism optimises for monopolies. Everyone agrees on this - this is why we have antitrust mechanisms. Unfortunately, they tend to facilitate and reinforce the problem instead of combat it.
My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.
> Everyone agrees on this
If you don't know the argument against your point of view, that is a good time to do some reading, not more writing.
I shouldn’t be focused on the printer market when commenting on a post about printers?
The printer market is a commodity market - the very opposite of a monopoly.
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> Capitalism optimises for monopolies. Everyone agrees on this - this is why we have antitrust mechanisms.
This is not even close to being correct. First, monopolies are almost always the products of government interference with markets; "natural" monopolies are rare. Second, antitrust mechanisms were not put in place by benevolent governments to help consumers; they were put in place by governments who were getting political contributions from the failed competitors of the so-called "monopolies", who could not compete on a level playing field and so went to the govenrment to buy favors. The actual results of antitrust enforcement have been to make things worse for consumers, not better.