[pixl97]

Onion futures act.

This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.

[bawolff]

Yes, although i would argue that a cartel suppressing supply is a different mechanism than what is happening with scalpers.

The onion futures thing is kind of interesting, because it was essentially the opposite of a scalper - they didn't try and buy all the onions to make price go up, they did it to crash the price of onions so that their short positions would pay off. Still a fair counter example to the idea that the market would self correct by itself.

People not trying to monopolize the food industry is a bit of an american centric view, e.g. Canada had a government mandated wheat monopsony for a long time. I think australia had something similar. I'm sure there are plenty of historical food monopolies. They of course couldn't be too greedy or its off with their head.

[gruez]

>This is the reason that businesses don't try to monopolize the food industry. It's not competition as we just saw from the egg industry. The government gets pushed back from the masses pretty quickly on food related issues.

But you provided your own counterexample with eggs?

[pixl97]

Note they didn't monopolize it, so I guess that was correct. They did form a cartel that did cause a lot of political issues, and if we had a functioning government would have been a very risky bet.