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by Crunchified
936 days ago
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IF the fees are just "fluff" that adds pure profit to the goods or services rendered, then these new fees regulations will have the government's desired effect. But if the fees are needed to cover costs and expenses, they WILL be incorporated into the bottom line prices, and the regulations will force the advertised prices to rise in lieu of the fees. As in any "free-market" system, the cost structures of each business will govern its competitiveness and the amount of profit that competition will allow. And, as usual, the government will find out that further regulating free markets (a three-word oxymoronical phrase) will not achieve the stated goals of lowering the public's costs of goods and services. It might, however, level the playing field in ways that appeal to voters who rely on government to solve all their woes. |
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Free Markets require information symmetry to function properly and efficiently. The sticker price is ideally supposed to include every cost along with profit margin, such that the buyer pays exactly that price and receives the product/service that's the end of the transaction. Externalities and hidden fees are anti-Free Market, they distort the core fundamental incentive that is supposed to make it work, allowing more expensive products/services to deceive people into buying them over less expensive ones they would have chosen otherwise.
>(a three-word oxymoronical phrase)
Only if you have an extremely understanding of how these tools work. Free Markets are meta-stable constructs without any inherent service to humans, without regulatory maintenance keeping them functional and linking them to people they'd collapse in various ways, or at least be extremely inefficient which defeats the whole point.
>will not achieve the stated goals of lowering the public's costs of goods and services
That is a systemic, long term goal, not just the next week or month. Information symmetry allowing people to make more efficient decisions is the basic driver of competition and sellers improving the value of their offerings. That is what creates lower costs/high value over time, in the same way that breaking up monopolies or monopsonies might well temporarily increase the price of goods/services in certain cases, but leaving them be indefinitely always results in lower efficiency/productivity long term.