Squilliam said:
I don't even know what those are!
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Im not an USAan.I suspect that even Kiwi-land has some sort of anti-dumping legislation. The classical example was television dumping in the 70s by Japanese cartels. The accusation was that either through state protectionism in the form of tariffs and subsidies, the fact that these cartels had monopoly/oligopoly pricing power, or both were able to able to undercut competitors in the US market by selling massively undercost and offset those loses in the home market. After competitors had been eliminated, they no longer sold undercost. Now whether or not this was a case of dumping you have to admit that the scenario is at least a plausible one.
Now, I'm not saying existing anti-dumping laws are not abused or are optimal. But that this scenario could easily lead to sub-optimal macroeconomic outcomes seems highly probable to me. Do you agree?
In a very similar way Microsoft's leveraging of it's OS monopoly -- by introducing special behavior when WordPerfect was detected to be running to make the system run poorly -- destroyed Wordperfect. Now Office has a monopoly and you can tell. Consumer prices range from 400-700 ish and Enterprise licensing can cost over $1k per license. This amounts to a rather significant MS tax (rent) for companies which do business in nations which are TRIPS signatories and especially those which do business with the US.
Thanks to current US (albeit declining) dominance of the international system and it's success in imposing a highly flawed artificial market (though all markets are in some sense artificial). We have a situation where a company manages to skim a significant portion of global GDP by using it's pricing power to sell a product with near 0 Marginal Cost at a vastly higher price point than would be possible in a perfectly competitive market.
If there was real competition in this market it's hard to believe that New Zealand would not be a net benefitor.
