Featured It turns out that Akio Toyoda was right

Does the US, NTSB, have a roll-over/roof strength specification? I know the EU has for several decades now, but I don't think the US has one in place - they're relying on the EU standards. Since most cars are manufactured to global safety specifications; with minor tweaks to meet local laws n standards.

 

It is not just wide pillars One reason I bought my 2008 Corolla was because I saw the upcoming design that came in 2010 where they raise the bottoms of the rear windows, adding blind spots. IMO that was just a design decision and now everyone is doing it

 

Unless they don't get a federal waiver.

It's far from clear that the "right thing" is for everyone's car to have a very large battery in it. If it were that clear, you wouldn't need the force of government to enforce your view.

Operate without a large, heavy and currently expensive battery.

There is a difference between legislative authority to regulate emissions and authority to prohibit them. That difference is one of policy that pertains to the opinions in the MA and VW cases.

Since a monopoly requires enforcement against putative competition, and a free market doesn't restrict competition, the enforcement of the restriction on competition wouldn't be a result of a free market.

Other than markets that are limited by geographical control of a natural resource, what monopoly exists without supporting government enforcement?

I accept the concession that prohibiting sale of a product reduces consumer choice. Certainly the prohibition on sale of leaded gasoline where the same cars also run on unleaded fuel is a less consequential restriction.

So the mandate is unnecessary? Outstanding.

 

The US does have a roof crush standard.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/fmvss/Roof_Crush_Final_Rule.pdf

I wasn't speaking California level.. The gradual tightening of federal fuel economy and emission regulations will result in a car company offering just hybrids, or higher prices for conventional ICE cars has the company buys CAFE credits from others.

Battery tech and costs have been improving faster than expected. When the Volt came out, GM claimed the battery was around $900 a kWh. For the Bolt, it was down to $100 per kWh. There is another ten years before a person won't be able to get a conventional ICE in California.

If PHEVs are allowed, the emissions aren't prohibited.

A free market allows competition to take on the dominating company in the field, but it also allows the dominate company to take actions that are regulated against in the current market. Or they simply buy out the little guy.

 

that is better than the '24

 

We actually have three groups and a commercial outfit:

• NTSB - investigates specific accidents in depth, typically a year or more, and makes recommendations
• NHTSA - broader vehicle safety, crash testing, recalls, and metrics
• EPA - measures fuel efficiency along with with CARB, emissions
• IIHS - independent crash testing and vehicle safety ratings

I know it is confusing but we're kinda like that.

Bob Wilson

 

Independent of the government but run by the auto insurance industry.

 

Emphasis added. That would be true only to the degree the actions regulated are competitive, and those actions would also be available to competitors unless the government intervenes to skew the market.

Regulatory barriers to competition are a real thing, but those only arise with the force of state action and are anti-competitive in nature. For a monopoly to exist there needs to be an enforcement mechanism such as exclusive control of a natural resource or a government to protect the monopoly.

If monopoly were the natural end of free competition, we'd have lots of examples of that having occurred.

Certainly, where prevention of a monopoly is the goal, a central authority issuing commands into an economy about what may be produced looks more like a problem than a remedy.

 

had one of these bad boys back in the late '80s.



There must be exceptions general rules ?

 

Where do you get your material? You're flying in the face of pretty much the whole state of affairs the antitrust laws had to be developed in. In the absence of effective antitrust regulation, firms that grow large enough (or merge or collude with enough competitors) have always been quite clever at finding ways to ward off competition from upstart firms or those who won't play ball, right up to (and as far as they can get away with beyond) other existing limits of criminal conduct.

 

Knowledge, education and experience. Does the source bear on the truth of the observation?

Since 19th century trusts developed in markets that relied on eminent domain and IP, those developments don't indicate the development of monopolies as a natural result of free competition. The companies that laid railroads and set telephone poles and wire didn't do it without a lot of government coercion. If your memory stretches back into the 1960s in the US, you will recall that railroads were a metaphorical trainwreck and renting your telephones from a Bell company wasn't great either. Well into the 1970s, the federal government set airline ticket prices, restricting consumer option by restricting what airlines could offer.

Since anti-trust regulation isn't an anti-competitive market manipulation, it isn't inconsistent with a market that features minimal government control or direction of consumer choices. Since even the most free markets also have limits on criminal behavior, that someone might commit a crime isn't an observation about how a system that prohibits that crime would work.

Your observation doesn't get to modern anti-trust legislation in which a company may control much less than half its market, but still exert so much control over that market that it may be broken up. Far from preventing monopolies, the maintenance of railroad, utility, cable, trucking airline, and telephone monopolies in our lifetimes has been with government assistance.

 

When the claim is so far removed from readily available history of the topic, then yes, insisting on its "truth" doesn't get very far if your self-reported "knowledge" and "experience" are the support you offer.

You mentioned education too. That's interesting. So it's been a few decades since I had economics in college. I haven't specialized in it since then. So I don't claim more than a nonspecialist but decent education. The textbook we used then said:

Anticompetitive results and monopoly power may be achieved or perpetuated in many ways:

1. by firms conspiring among themselves (colluding) to restrict output or raise prices, or otherwise failing to compete with one another
2. by firms adopting practices "in restraint of trade," such as contracts that bind a purchaser to buy all its supplies from a single seller
3. by a firm employing "predatory" practices against rival sellers in an effort to force them into bankruptcy, "good behavior," or merger
4. by a merger of existing firms into a new and larger firm
5. by one firm acquiring control of other firms through purchasing their stock or acquiring their physical assets
6. by a firm finding monopoly "thrust upon it" (in the words of the distinguished American jurist Learned Hand) either by its natural efficiency as a single producer or by successful innovation.

Each of the first five ways has been the object of antitrust legislation.
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Your education, by contrast, has left you thinking "for a monopoly to exist there needs to be an enforcement mechanism such as exclusive control of a natural resource or a government to protect the monopoly." Can you say more about the education that gave you that idea?

Ok, so, since 1890, our system has maintained the necessity of prohibiting those first five ways of achieving or perpetuating monopoly power as crimes, because it wasn't enough to rely on other existing criminal laws that might be implicated (laws against assault or murder, for example, certainly apply to some predatory practices against rival sellers, but can't be relied on to deter all of them). We needed laws specifically drafted to oppose monopoly. Such an active role of government to oppose monopoly would hardly be required if monopoly had no way to exist without government's help.

 

Since the history was recounted for you and not far removed from readily available history, you may have misconstrued either the claim or the history.

I didn't insist on its "truth", but recount some of the pertinent history none of which you've effectively disputed.

I didn't offer any of those in support. Did you misunderstand your own question? It was,

Which isn't pertinent to the issue anymore than your deposit of a straw argument previously.

Emphasis added. You haven't illustrated a contrast.

Collusion to fix prices requires an enforcement mechanism to prevent people outside the agreement from competing. A contract is a legal instrument requiring enforcement. Depending on the practice, No. 3 can be competition or a crime. Merger and acquisition are a common and voluntary process, and not sufficient by themselves to create a monopoly. None of those work without an enforcement mechanism.

A modern example of the sixth not too long ago might be Microsoft. Though the court found that it had less than 30% of the industry sales (iirc) it arguably exercised a monopoly power because it was so much larger than any other part of the industry 20 years ago. Tesla has some advantages accruing to it from innovation. For both exclusive rights to their IP is maintained with government enforcement.

That is not well reasoned. First, there's been no claim that a monopoly has no way to exist without government's help. Second, that monopolies have been created and maintained with the help of government doesn't bear on whether we need laws against anticompetitive practices or monopoly concentrations of market control. That the way government organized our activities and can grow to favor or disfavor actors in a market can give rise to a need to limit monopoly powers in markets.

Yes, I can. You seem easily distracted by matters that don't bear on the issue. I'd suggest a focus on what has been written rather than a search for credentials.

 

Perhaps I did misconstrue your claim. Here's what I saw, both in the form of your #143's rhetorical question and your #148's plain statement:

In your #143 form, you allow only two conditions for a monopoly to exist: markets "limited by geographical control of a natural resource", or "supporting government enforcement".

In your #148 form by itself, your use of "such as" leaves possibility that "an enforcement mechanism" could perhaps be "exclusive control of a natural resource", "a government to protect the monopoly", or something else.

Reading #143 and #148 together, I did construe your claim to be that any monopoly that isn't based on natural resource geography is one that would not exist without government protecting it.

So perhaps I misconstrued that claim. Here in your latest—

—it seems more that all you're getting at with "enforcement" is the government's basic job of assuring the dependable infrastructure—courts to enforce contracts, recorders of deeds and ownership and control, and so on—that any firm relies on whether monopolistic or not. If that's indeed all you meant—the government 'protection' you speak of for a monopoly is simply the government protection any business receives—then I apologize for reading your posts as if you had a less tautological point in mind.

That understanding of your point would then be consistent with the historical record that firms have often been able—when not explicitly forbidden—to exploit those elements of universal business infrastructure to achieve monopolistic conditions, requiring our history of legislation and enforcement specifically tailored to combating that.

Again, I did understand that to be exactly the claim you had made (for any monopoly not resting on natural resource geography). If you weren't claiming that after all, then ok.

Whether or not I misconstrued what your claim was, remember that this is what you said when I challenged it:

To rechristen a claim as an 'observation' is one classic rhetorical way to insist on its "truth" without quite saying so, and then to write of "the truth of" it (as if that were not exactly what's in question) doubles down.

If taken as a generic question "does the source bear on the truth of a claim", the answer is "a person who already knows whether the claim's true doesn't need that information, but anyone else does, and both (a) the source itself, and (b) the claimant's willingness to provide it, are important information for vetting the claim".

See above; those were two of the only three things you did offer when pressed for support. Education was the third.

Your self-report of knowledge or experience is fully as good as my self-report of knowledge or experience; either one plus three dollars will buy a cup of coffee. That you also named 'education' seemed worth following up on, not because of credentials for credentials' sake, but because you named it, and if you had been claiming (as I thought you were, remember) that monopoly without government's help wasn't a thing, it would have been interesting to know how your education and mine diverged so markedly on that.

 

It was not rhetorical. I was curious about what Trollbait had in mind.

You didn't press for support or offer substantial challenge. Instead, you offer,

That reads as a poorly concealed insult, not entirely unlike

or

It seems unlikely that you believe that the process of education is giving people material they reproduce later.

Emphasis added. Are you going to an effort to be confused? If you have to add the parethetical, you are aware that

...didn't reflect a claim made, right?

I cannot agree. If Albert Einstein and Henny Youngman both claim that general relativity is a valid description of how our world works and that mothers in law can be a burden, which individual articulates which claim has no bearing on the validity of either. Moreover, I believe you understood that I am the source of my claims.

This is not a rhetorical question: Are you under the impression that the issue is the desirability of anti-trust laws?

The claim I addressed is that monopolies are the natural end of a free market. If in the absence of laws against monopolies, they can develop in relatively free markets, in moderately free markets and in state controlled economies, if monopoly development is the natural end of all legal systems that don't prohibit them, then their existence can't be an argument against free markets. An argument that applies to all cannot be an argument against one only.

 

It's not just California, Virginia pledges to ban ICE same schedule as Ca. I am not quite as old as @mikefocke but soon so the youngsters will have sort this boomer conflict out.

 

Are you sure? I thought Virginia decided not to renew its participation in the California CARB standards.
June- Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares: Virginia Will Exit California Electric Vehicle Mandate at End of Year | Governor.Virginia.gov

 

California 'clean' policies; they'll have to sort the ramifications out after the fact, apparently. Wanting to rush plugins along - yet SoCal just lost tons of power lines & transformers. Diesel generator backup? How's that going to work. When you think of all the 100s of 1,000s of diesel RVs that come to places like mammoth, Tahoe, Redwoods, Glamis & Pismo sand dunes etc that may be barred ... there goes all that tourism income. - How bout all the recently burned out homes .... builders not able to rebuild plumbed for clean burning natural gas - but rather all electric in a state that already has to import limited power ?
That's why we over built our roof top PV in our So Cal home ... taxes not funding what they ought to fund but we needed to charge to plugins just to get to work.

 

...if Gov Youngkin was legally able to unilaterally circumvent the Va. law, we have temporary reprieve, but he is short timer

 

The prices will solve the problem. It is easy to say "Drill Baby Drill" but the drilling companies have to make a profit too. Over production puts them out of business soon enough. Worse, the cheap oil is gone. It is much more expensive to drill a well in the areas where petroleum is found ... especially with workers whose cost of living balloons.

Bob Wilson