4 ms·

By your logic car companies should have been charging more for cars used as taxis or other commercial purposes all along. The value of a Ford Crown Vic used by

by imgabe 10y ago

By your logic car companies should have been charging more for cars used as taxis or other commercial purposes all along. The value of a Ford Crown Vic used by the police to stop a bank robbery is clearly higher than value of a Ford Crown Vic used to drive an 80-year-old between the retirement home and the golf course, right? Oh, except that value was created by the person using the car not the car itself, which just sits there until someone does something. That person does all the work and assumes all the risk, so why should Ford be rewarded for their effort? Do you want to go to Home Depot and pay different prices for nails based on the value of the building you're going to build with them? This rabbit hole goes a long way down.

MarkMc 10y ago
Well I'm still in favour of competition, so if Ford tries to charge the police more for using their cars the police are free to switch to Toyotas. Same for taxi and courier companies. And so the general rule commodity products would be that the price would not rise much above the cost of production. But if Ford was to develop something better than any other car company - say, a car with the greatest acceleration - I would like them to be able to charge different price depending on whether the purchaser is the police force or a car racing team. Nails are very much a commodity product, so once again competition would prohibit the supplier from charging much more than the cost of production. But let's say that a chemical company developed a superior adhesive such that a carpenter could save an hour on some types of construction jobs. The value of a carpenter's time is much more in the United States than in Indonesia, so I would like the chemical company to be able to charge much more for the same adhesive in the US compared to Indonesia.

4 ms·

By your logic car companies should have been charging more for cars used as taxis or other commercial purposes all along. The value of a Ford Crown Vic used by

by imgabe 10y ago

MarkMc 10y ago
Well I'm still in favour of competition, so if Ford tries to charge the police more for using their cars the police are free to switch to Toyotas. Same for taxi and courier companies. And so the general rule commodity products would be that the price would not rise much above the cost of production. But if Ford was to develop something better than any other car company - say, a car with the greatest acceleration - I would like them to be able to charge different price depending on whether the purchaser is the police force or a car racing team. Nails are very much a commodity product, so once again competition would prohibit the supplier from charging much more than the cost of production. But let's say that a chemical company developed a superior adhesive such that a carpenter could save an hour on some types of construction jobs. The value of a carpenter's time is much more in the United States than in Indonesia, so I would like the chemical company to be able to charge much more for the same adhesive in the US compared to Indonesia.