[runnerup]

That is an incredibly shallow and fairly snarky response. I can do a lot of legwork to fill out a more robust position based on assumptions about people’s beliefs who make quips like this.

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I think the most important thing this misses are that there are more parties to an economic enterprise than just a single seller and their buyers. At one extreme, let’s envision a fictional world:

Walmart builds a small empire on the back of public highways. They pay fair taxes which allows the highways to capture and reinvest the value they created for Walmart.

Walmart then lobbies government leaders to eliminate their taxes. Walmart now pays no taxes.

Walmart continues to extract value from the public highways but no longer shares that value with the government which created the value.

I’m not saying this is literally what’s happening - I’m just using it as an example to show how a company can provide great prices to customers, while inappropriately capturing value created by others. This is just to show that your model posited above fails to take into account some pretty large effects in the real world.