Competition that is meaningful. Like if you produce bottled water, and you lower the quality of it (like, idk maybe theres stuff floating inside) so its cheaper to make, people will notice and switch to an alternative. And when the alternative tries something similar, they’ll switch back to you. Regulation can also help with this but at the same time it increases the barrier to entry for new players, lowering competition. I think.
Regulation in this scenario doesn’t work because the water companies are operating in some country across the world which has no money or army to enforce its laws. Or the local politicians are corrupt. There is no competition because people don’t have any real choice: they have to drink water which means they have to buy it from some company (as opposed to getting it for free as a human right). That is the big lie we’re all told about capitalism: that competition is a given in every market, government regulation is “in the way” and that the free market will somehow lead to the best outcome for all. At least for water (and also for web browsers), that is patently and obviously not true.
once they have a monopoly
what if the government broke up monopolies, and promoted competition? then you wouldn’t have the large price increase you described afterwards.
ofc competition alone cant fix the environmental issues you described, thats probably best solved by some government body, like if they taxed new plastic being produced so companies would be incentivized to recycle what they could.
also thx for actually writing a longer reply
Like if you produce bottled water, and you lower the quality of it (like, idk maybe theres stuff floating inside) so its cheaper to make, people will notice and switch to an alternative. And when the alternative tries something similar, they’ll switch back to you.
So now you have 2 companies selling bottled water with stuff floating in it.
So why don’t you start a bottled water company that’ll make it better? If there’s an opening in the market for something like that, it’ll be filled by people wanting to make money
Competition that is meaningful. Like if you produce bottled water, and you lower the quality of it (like, idk maybe theres stuff floating inside) so its cheaper to make, people will notice and switch to an alternative. And when the alternative tries something similar, they’ll switch back to you. Regulation can also help with this but at the same time it increases the barrier to entry for new players, lowering competition. I think.
So the end result of this is… companies race to burn fossil fuels into plastic to take water away from municipal or agricultural sources, remove as much safety filtering as they legally (or illegally) can “because it’s cheaper and more competitive” and buy up as much water rights and other water bottling companies as they can with the centralized capital because economies of scale mean better margins. And then once they have a monopoly, they jack up the price and screw over everyone who doesn’t have free water in their taps (which is everyone because the cities all got priced out and had to sell their water rights so now people have to buy bottled water).
Regulation in this scenario doesn’t work because the water companies are operating in some country across the world which has no money or army to enforce its laws. Or the local politicians are corrupt. There is no competition because people don’t have any real choice: they have to drink water which means they have to buy it from some company (as opposed to getting it for free as a human right). That is the big lie we’re all told about capitalism: that competition is a given in every market, government regulation is “in the way” and that the free market will somehow lead to the best outcome for all. At least for water (and also for web browsers), that is patently and obviously not true.
Edit: link formatting
What a terrible terrible example. Bottled water is just theft
from rain clouds?
So now you have 2 companies selling bottled water with stuff floating in it.
So why don’t you start a bottled water company that’ll make it better? If there’s an opening in the market for something like that, it’ll be filled by people wanting to make money