When corporations have pricing power they are legally obligated to the share holders to maximize profits.
I'm not advocating for or against.
It's unfortunate everyone agrees on the situation.
- profit seeking corps.
- limited competition due to market consolidation and limited supply chains.
- wage inflation due to limited workers because of aging population, limited immigration, low birth rates, skills gaps, geography gaps, .
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We are probably just seeing the effects of egg producers trying to avoid a bullwhip effect where in two years we are drowning in eggs because the market over-responded. So, they limit investment in production increases today while enjoying the result of an exogenous supply shock on prices. Poof: record profits.
What else should we do? Price controls? They provably cause more harm than good. Force companies to invest in egg production? Ridiculous overreach. The market will adapt, people will reduce egg consumption (perhaps durably), and we can play out the counterfactual in 20 years to see if the egg industry shot itself in the foot or not.
Basic microeconomics demonstrates that this holds true _in a competitive market_. The record profits tell us that prices have come decoupled from marginal cost, from which we can conclude that major egg producers have been allowed to merge to a point such that the market is no longer competitive.
The difference between the cheap eggs of 2 years ago and the expensive eggs of today is not that too many egg companies merged.
Blaming all high prices on anticompetitive behavior is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yes, hence my point about semiconductor fabs vs. hen cloacas.
You can’t just point to a single product type undergoing a price shock and declare the market has failed. Preferences are sticky, but substitutes abound. People will adjust their preferences, and egg consumption will drop. If prices stay high, other products will begin to take the place of eggs in various contexts. We aren’t entitled to cheap eggs, but neither are the producers guaranteed record profits beyond a quarter or two. This too shall pass.
Many modern, western countries have supply management policies in place to help steady commodities markets, e.g. Canadian dairy management.
Heck, US farm subsidies exist specifically for this reason: to help support producers when markets soften. There's just no policies in place to moderate market behaviour when prices swing up (privatize the profits, socialize the losses, baby!)
There is a middle ground between unfettered, free market neoliberalism and full blown state control. Unfortunately, the kind of thought-limiting rhetoric you're demonstrating here shuts down discussions before they get started.
In this case, the limited competition isn't due to market consolidation, it's due to a disease wiping out a load of the supply.