[Bjartr]

Just because it's a relative scale doesn't make it not price manipulation. If a company would prie things one way, but the law says they must change the price, you're manipulating their pricing.

You can argue the benefits of doing so, but you can't argue that's not what you are doing.

[unexaminedlife]

It seems maybe I don't have a refined enough vocabulary to express what I'm thinking. Would you consider taxes, or laws in general, price manipulation? It seems to be pretty loosely defined what we're talking about.

I'm not disagreeing that the definition may mean all the things we're talking about, but I see nuance and an entire spectrum of things that are different but maybe technically called price manipulation.

From a quick glance online it seems "price manipulation" has more to do with fraud, and not laws.

[Bjartr]

Laws that influence prices by altering incentives are not price manipulation. Laws that say "Hey, those prices you've set? Yeah, you can't do that, change them." Is price manipulation. I've called the thing you've suggested price manipulation, because the price of X to one tier necessarily influences the price of X to another tier (smaller companies get a better deal, which was your goal).

Changing a price in one spot necessarily impacts price in another. It limits the ability for a company to set its own prices arbitrarily, in fact, that's the whole point. I'm using the term "price manipulation" in its literal sense.

A sales tax doesn't quite fall under this because if a company wants to sell at $Y, but sales tax is assessed, the can choose to reduce the item price to hit a customer facing price of $Y. The point of your idea is to limit the price that can be offered in specific circumstances.

In my original post, I didn't use the phrase "price manipulation", I said that a potential negative view taken by a conservative could be "Manipulating an independent company's pricing by legal mandate in some new way is regulatory overreach.". And I stand by the idea that that could still be a negative view taken by a conservative to argue against your proposal. I'm not personally saying that it's a bad idea, I'm providing a balancing thought against your suggestion that it was unlikely to be viewed negatively from a conservative viewpoint.

[unexaminedlife]

Found some reading which seems to help explain the role of government in commodity prices.

https://www.nios.ac.in/media/documents/SecEcoCour/English/Ch...

[Bjartr]

That's a useful starting point. Thanks for sharing it. I do think that it's only a starting point, implementing real world policies that have the intended effect is a lot harder in practice.