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Comment by manfredo | Hacker News Reader

Even if it is motivated by an attempt to gain competitive advantage, it's still a good thing. If the competition can't find labor at less than $15 an hour, then they'll either go out of business or start offering competitive pay. It's an example of capitalism working both for business and employees.

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So once competition is gone what happens?

Regulate or break up the monopoly if they abuse their monopoly power.

The monopoly exists because competition cannot begin because of minimum wage, so how is that an abuse of power? You couldn't argue that in court to regulate it.

Being a monopoly isn't the problem. It's when monopoly power is abused that the government steps in.

So my original question was. Once the competition is gone... what happens? This a government regulation problem not a monopoly problem.

What happens? Are you asking what the government would do if Amazon gains a monopoly and abuses that power?

If so, there are lots of possibilities, including the break of Amazon into baby-Amazons like AT&T in 1984 or Standard Oil in 1911. They could install overseers like they did when Microsoft was found guilty of abusing their monopoly. It wouldn't be an unprecedented situation.

You’re missing the point. If a monopoly is created because of government regulation and no competition can thrive because of government policy. There is no monopoly abuse. It’s just how it is because the government screwed up.

So what was different with AT&T? You couldn't just create a phone company and compete with AT&T. They had franchise agreements with cities and exclusive rights for space on telephone poles.

They were still found to be an abusive monopoly even though their monopoly was created by government regulation.

Agreed. Capitalizm works best when the incentives are not all in one direction. It appears in this case some other incentives are at play be they looking for good PR, the threat of workers organizing or government regulation. It helps when the workers have some leverage on their side.

It's like the complement of flooding the market with cheap goods. You can similarly hog up some resource that your competitors also need, driving up its price. E.g. labor. Force competitors to sell cheap, and/or pay more for inputs.

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