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Old 10-14-2011, 10:29 AM
Loke Loke is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2010
Location: AKANON PROBABLY
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Samoht, you can't take one sector of the economy (oil), which happens to be largely run by cartels (like opec) and then argue that it is representative of an economy as a whole. That is like me taking the natural monopoly provided to utility companies and using their actions to forecast the actions of a restaurant - one faces competition while the other does not. Oil is a very particular sector of the economy and not at all representative of economic actions under competition.

Generally speaking, savings are passed on to the consumer so as to attain a higher share of the market, thus increasing profits. This has been shown time and time again - there are even instances in which savings beyond actual cost of production were passed to the consumer due to competition (Utah Pie Company v. Continental) - given there were monopolistic factors there - but still. You don't see me sitting here claiming that all companies will sell their products at below cost because I have one example of that having happened.

Again, wealth is not finite - capital may be finite, but capital and wealth are two different things. The rich are getting richer, but every statistic says that the poor are getting richer too (rich relative to past rich, poor relative to past poor). I'm not sure where (aside from marx) you got these ideas from, but even modern economics that I think are generally wrong tend to disagree with the majority of what you're saying - there is simply too much evidence to the contrary.