Comment by Aunche
2 years ago
> It was sufficient proof to convince a full jury, which makes them guilty of price fixing.
Sure, but it's still the lowest burden of proof. My point isn't to make Cal-Maine the underdog. It's to point out the irony that anticapitalists will suddenly trust capitalists 100% whenever they say something that agrees with them, regardless of the motivations of such a claim. It's like when people use Microsoft's antitrust lawsuits as evidence as that all billionaires can't be trusted, yet they're completely uncritically accepting arguments made by lawyers who represented other billionaires.
Of course the market is perfectly efficient, but 90% of the time it is, especially for commodities like eggs. It may be the case that this is getting worse, but no it is not possible for companies to suddenly decided to be greedy in 2021.
> anticapitalists will suddenly trust capitalists 100% whenever they say something that agrees with them
This seems like a twisting of the facts.
First of all, one does not need to be "anticapitalist" to believe that price-fixing is bad.
Second of all, it's less that we will suddenly "trust capitalists" and more that when you've got an actual trial in our actual justice system (whether civil or criminal) and solid evidence can be presented to prove that one set of capitalists was acting in bad faith (that just happened to be in a way that happened to hurt other capitalists as well as regular people)...
...it holds much more weight than just "someone saying something", whatever preexisting biases it might agree with.
If you have so much faith in civil jury verdicts, then do the previous lawsuits against egg producers where the jury found them innocent disprove the conspiracy [1]?
Afaict, there was no direct evidence of any conspiracy. The egg producers were exporting more eggs and giving chickens more room. The former can be explained by market conditions and the latter can be explained by pressure from animal rights organizations.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/antitrust/kraft-kellogg-go-aft...