Amazon refusing to sell one particular business's product is not a meaningful reduction in consumer choice. Amazon is not the sole seller of books, or of books online. They have no "effective monopoly" outside of their own Amazon marketplace - and even then others can compete against Amazon, by selling products on Amazon.

Wiki blurb on Anti-Trust Act: "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony [. . . ]"[13]

So has Amazon monopolized book sales? No, there are still retail bookstores who can continue to sell the books.

Is Amazon trying to monopolize online book sales? Not particularly - other competitors exist, and they're not trying to force a publisher to only sell through them. They are trying to get a better contract, but that's normal business negotiation.

The only way you can call Amazon a monopoly is by using a nonsensical definition that does not fall under the language of this act. (Hint: If your definition makes every business a monopoly, your use of the word monopoly becomes useless)

When Amazon isn't allowed to negotiate what it sells in its own online store, you've effectively taken over ownership of Amazon. Who are you giving that ownership to, and what are you planning to do to compensate Amazon's owners?

Do you know the publisher in question was accused of being a part of a price-fixing cartel with Apple? They were trying to keep book prices high, and they don't have the "legal right to do that".

Now I learn that if Amazon wants to make book pricers lower, they don't have the "legal right to do that", either.

What purpose are these laws serving?

The publishers don't have a right to exist as they currently are. Book publishing has changed and their model built when book publishing had high upfront costs doesn't work so well in an age where you can toss an ebook on the internet for practically nothing.

That's not a monopoly. Every single one of those customers have the ability to choose any other Internet retailer. It's as simple as typing a new address in the browser. What is Amazon going to do, hijack their computer with a script?

There's market power there, but that's legitimately earned.

In summary: you want to veto the choice of consumers for cheaper goods, so that publishers can sell them books for a higher price.

Because if you didn't do this, then Amazon would use their market power to sell consumers cheaper books, which is harmful.

Expensive books protect consumers. Um, yay?

"Lowest cost seller of everything" is not a monopoly. Monopolies involve markets for specific goods. A monopoly on "everything" is impossible, because of the sheer number of goods and methods of distribution involved. If a company can figure out how to do that without use of government force - they deserve to be the "monopoly".

You also completely missed the point - which was that this so-called monopoly scenario ends up providing the lowest cost goods to the customers - maximizing value to them.

/facepalm

1. Amazon is not a monopolist.

2. Amazon doesn't own the Internet.

3. The only "monopoly" Amazon has is the right to sell things on Amazon. You seem to be suggesting that everyone has a right to sell things on Amazon on their own terms, and that Amazon isn't allowed to negotiated the terms of that business contract.

So did buggy whip manufacturers. That's not evidence of a problem or a monopoly situation. Think, for crying out loud.

A free market is not "status quo forever".

Why did they go after a different market in the first place? Profit margins. What does that tell you about the profit margins of scaled down EVs?

It also increases costs, because you're starting from scratch and testing new methods/configurations. Care to break down the fixed and marginal costs of the two choices?

Monopoly is not defined as "power to `hurt' customers" or "customer faces a reduced number of choices", so all the rest of your post is a red herring.

Hachette books does not have an innate right to use Amazon to sell their wares. If they don't like the level of service provided by Amazon, Amazon can do NOTHING to stop Hachette from creating an online store for their readers and shipping books by their choice of USPS, UPS, or FedEx. They could even sell their readers ebooks and not deal with the logistics of killing trees and moving them around.

Or if that's too much work for Hachette, there a myriad of other online retailers who will gladly work with them to sell their wares.

The very idea of "muscling" in the online realm is ridiculous. Amazon can take their ball and go home but they can't force anyone else to use their ball.

Humans aren't bacteria.

You seem to have this silly idea that finite resources will suddenly catastrophically run out - to the complete surprise of the people who have the most to profit from maintaining a regular supply of said resources.

Your scenario requires these foolish suppliers to fail to notice that they're running out of the very resources they're selling - and thus selling at a price/quantity in a way that fuels constant/growing demand (which is non-optimal for profit) - until a day comes when the natural resource tap suddenly switches off with no warning.

So in this scenario, they become lowest cost seller of everything? And this is harmful to customers, how?

If they decide they're a "monopoly" and jack up their prices - what do you think happens in the realm of online retail?

Let me get to the point. I don't think an "effective monopoly" is remotely possible in online sales, absent government intervention.

Is Amazon going to buy out all the search engines so people can't find cheaper retailers? How can Amazon jack up their prices, earn "monopoly profits", and keep competitors from popping up? If they continue to sell at cost to "kill" competitors, they're not harming customers.

Talking about "online tyrants" is ridiculous.

What on earth would an "effective monopoly" look like in online retail?

How would you even "muscle out" the competition?

You apparently have no concept of what a supply curve is.

That's far too naÃve. You're assuming the costs and profits are linear, or that there the demand scales the same.

If it's so easy - why isn't Tesla doing it?

Because there are multiple paths to the same result, "selecting for the same result" is not guaranteed to follow a specific path.

That is, if evolution is driven by random mutation, where the selection of a particular path is a random result.

Food is cheap. "artificially inflate" sounds like conspiracy thinking, which isn't necessary to explain waste - there's a cost to using materials efficiently, so sometimes we don't pay the cost to go beyond 70, 50, or 30 percent efficiency due to diminishing returns.

In this case, potentially contaminated food wasn't worth the risk. In the US, the prime area to "give it away", there's no problem of people starving to death. Other parts of the world where it might do good are in other parts of the world - shipping the food adds costs - and again, risk of it being bad food, not "perfectly good food".

You utopians need to pay more attention to the failed utopians from the last century. Life's problems are not that easy, because people are complicated, and the systems we live in aren't simple either.