Mick
----
All that's needed to bust a cartel is a hunch by at least one
membr
that, for whatever reason, he's better off cheating than staying in.
Even aside from geopolitical considerations, the might-be-cheater could
be looking at a gap between cartel price and either short- or long-run
marginal cost (which, of course, includes more than "labor cost," unless
as a matter of dogma _all_ costs are simply "labor costs"), but he could
also be looking to charging below-cost (in the short run), for the usual
"predatory" (or, less judgmentally, customer-development,
competitor-forestalling) reasons. Value-theoretic considerations are
irrelevant to this reasoning.
Paul
----
Be realistic. Do you really think that the Nigerians were
selling oil below its value when they exceeded their Opec
quotas?
If the number of Niaras they got for selling a barrel represented
less labour than was expended to produce it, then either the
oil industry would have had to been less profitable than other
industries, or oil workers would have to have been paid less
than the average wage in Nigeria. In fact the opposite was the
case, and this was because the world market price of oil expressed
in Nairas was greater ( after deducting the cost of imported
means of production ) than the oil's labour value expressed in
Nairas. It was this that made it advantageous to them to
exceed the quota.
