OK. Now finally we have something specific. It is an absurd charge. There are too many steel companies, most of which do not sell steel to automakers, for such an agreement to hold any threat. Steel companies sell to the makers of kitchen appliances, the construction industry, etc., and many of them do not sell to the auto industry at all. Any of them could have sold to Tucker and not been hurt by automaker threats.
But let's assume that the charge about Tucker is true, and that there was insufficient competition in the steel industry. Here is how the anti-Tucker scheme plays out in the real world. The steel companies (all of them, somehow, are under the thrall of the big automakers) agree with the big automakers not to sell steel to Tucker. Now each steel company can increase its market share by secretly cheating on the agreement and selling steel to Tucker. Each steel company has to worry that the others will cheat, and each steel company wants to be the first to cheat, so as to get the additional business. You can see that under such unstable conditions agreements like this cannot last long, and history shows that they never do, unless they are enforced by government. Just thinking about it for ten seconds, I would suppose that the cheating could take the form of selling steel to some intermediary, let's say a construction company, who would then sell the steel to Tucker. Once the ruse was discovered, the whole agreement would fall apart. --- On Thu, 1/21/10, diablogonzales <[email protected]> wrote: Nonsense. When Tucker tried to buy steel for his car the big automakers threatened to take business away from anyone selling steel to them. There are a lot of anticompetitive practices used to harrass legitimate competition. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
