Chaos Cluster
General Forums => Serious Discussions and Debates => Topic started by: Bullseye55 on July 04, 2011, 12:38:54 am
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This is for debate.
Question: Should action be took by the government to demolish companies that cheap out the customers and buy out other companies?
If you say yes(or no) say which companies you have experienced(or gave you cheap products or service).
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Should the government demolish companies which buy other companies? Only if you're in favour of there being no private ownership of things which I'm not.
Should the government ('the government' - how do you deal with multinational companies as if you try to do this they will simply relocate their main office to a country which won't screw them?) be more aggressive in trying to deal with monopolies? Quite possibly but as per my point in brackets...how can a government deal with a multinational? It would require a level of co-operation between governments across the world which is far beyond what we can realistically expect. Does this mean we should give up? No, but its a complex issue.
As for companies which 'cheap out' customers. You'll need to explain precisely what you mean. If you mean companies which produce cheap but shoddy merchandise, no. They produce a product which meets a demand. If you want a better product, buy a better product. If you mean companies which produce products which don't manage to achieve that which they promise it will - that is illegal and if someone experiences such they should approach the company. If its bought to a governments attention that a company is doing such they should be taken to task about it yes, though generally it would be up to the customer to raise the issues, for instance in the court of law. In addition it would be hoped that economic principles would prevent most companies from following such a path as theoretically people would stop buying from them.
Aaaaand thats the end of my incoherant ramblings for now :P
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I'm with GPH on the "I'm not sure what you mean. At all."
There's a lot of ways to make something cheaper.
-Finding a new way to mechanize production of a part to lower the cost? Good.
-Improving a product, increasing demand as a result, and therefore lowering the per unit production cost? Great.
-Developing a new design that produces a product of equal quality, with either less parts or less complex assembly and therefore cost? Awesome.
-Cutting corners to build a piece of crap that will break right after the warranty expires? Bad.
-Lying and false advertising to make your product look far better than it really is? Terrible.
-Employing slave labor or sweatshops? Abysmal.
Likewise, why is a company buying others out? There's plenty of reasons - both good and bad - to do this. If they're trying to buy everyone else purely to monopolize an industry, then yeah, there's huge problems with that, and anti-monopoly laws need to be enforced.
On the other hand, sometimes a company fails, but has one good product that makes them worth buying to another company. Sometimes a company forms intentionally around a product they don't have the resources to make happen, so they can sell the tech to Google (or whoever). No problem, and this is, in fact, sometimes the only feasible way to get an idea off the ground.
You really can't use blanket statements like "making stuff cheap is bad" or "buying another company is bad", because it really, really, depends on why it's being down, and what the results are.
Do I think we need better enforcement of things like anti-monopoly laws, especially in the US? Yes. It's important, however, that they only get applied when there's clear abuses of the system.
As for stopping the use of sweatshops and the like, that's a clusterfark worthy of its own discussion thread, as the certain entire industries have been corrupted by that, and fixing them would require several steps.
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is porn cheap? low. but is it lowly? de-based. but is it meaningful? haaaaaa haaaa, SirG