“Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly” by John Kenneth Galbraith. As we all know the presence of monopolies is just giving the owner an opportunity to control an unfair market for everyone participating. Mr. Galbraith’s quote is strictly stating that oligopolies are just a different way of drawing up an identical game plan to control a particular market. This falls right into the conversation about the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 as it relates to why it was created, its relevance today, and how we can apply it to today’s marketplace. The Packers and Stockyards Act (PSA) of 1921 was put in place to ensure the presence of competition in the livestock, meat, and poultry markets. The reason this was put in place was strictly do to the upcoming oligopoly appearance between five different large meat packers known as the “Big Five.” These five companies included: Swift and Company, Armour and Company, Cudahy Packing Company, Wilson and Company, and Morris and Company. Amongst these five companies there were anticompetitive actions taking place that were leading to an unfair environment effecting many producers and consumers that were …show more content…
It’s most recent plunge into the media was under the Obama administration where they have discussed banning packer to packer sales along with many other rules known as the “GIPSA rule.” Some of the other rules under the GIPSA rule would include: limiting unfair arrangements between packers and dealers, force companies that pay growers that are under a tournament system the same amount as growers that raise the exact same type of poultry, and provide new protections for producers that are required to provide expensive upgrades to their facilities. All of these additions to the packers and stockyard acts are really just an effort to modify the act as the agricultural marketplace has grown extensively since it was passed in
The beginning of Meat Inspection Act seemed to be at 1904, after “The Jungle” of Sinclair published. In fact, it started twenty years earlier, the regular law, used to satisfy Europe, the largest meat export market, but in 1865 Congress passed an act to prevent the importation of diseased cattle and pigs. Because of disease, European like Italian, French, and English restricted or banned the importation meat, and they turned to another supplier. Some bills were introduced but they failed to gather sufficient support. May 1884, Bureau of Animal Industry was established, it was doing good job in fighting Europe restrictions, helping the packers, but not helping the domestic consumers. March 1891, the first major meat inspection law was passed; some country removed the prohibitions on importing American pork. It distressed the European packing industry as well. So, they imposed more standards. Government had to do more action; major percent meat slaughtered was inspected. Some of companies exploited the law, but most of them, especially big companies agreed with the committee in 1902. In 1904, Smith, who was a great information aid to Sinclair, published a series of articles in The Lancet...
The year 1906 brought about a new era in governmental legislation that helped to shape the way privately owned producers of consumable goods would conduct themselves in the future. President Theodore Roosevelt, a man known for his tenaciousness when tackling the issues of the people, pursued these legislative changes, refusing to back down to the lobbyists who stood in his way. One such industry brought to its knees was the meat packing industry, a thriving group of companies that supplied not only the United States but also the markets in Europe with processed foods.
During the Progressive era, consumer safety was a hot issue. In Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, there were many disturbing things the American people learned about the meat packing industry. After people saw that their meat had dead rats and tuberculosis many did not want to buy any meat. People were disgusted by the things that they could buy without knowing what it was. This brought about stricter health codes and made the consumers have a little more peace of mind.
The need for affordable, efficiently produced meat became apparent in the 1920’s. Foer provides background information on how Arthur Perdue and John Tyson helped to build the original factory farm by combining cheap feeds, mechanical debeaking, and automated living environ...
The first of the legislation of the federal government in this time was the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. The Meat Inspection Act required the federal inspection of meats that were headed for interstate commerce and this gave much power to the big bosses of the Agriculture Department. The powers that this act endowed to the big bosses of the Department of Agriculture was to set the standards or the sanitary conditions. This Act basically gives the government the power to say what is sanitary and safe and what is vile and rank. The Meat Inspection Act was brought to the attention of the political hierarchy in great part to the novel written by Upton Sinclair. Upton portrayed the meat packing industry of Chicago as vile and disgusting. He expressed hideous images of rats and feces and other things very unfit for the food that they were eating. President Roosevelt read the book, The Jungle, and was totally convinced and he acted very quickly. In this, he sent a few federal agent to go investigate this convincing claim to see if it existed, they reiterated his disgusting results. Thus the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 was passed by the Congress and by Roosevelt on its way to becoming a part of the incredible regulations of the Progressive Era.
The momentum generated by the passage of the Meat Inspection Act helped secure the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which had been stalled in Congress since 1905. With these two pieces of legislation, the federal government took important steps to assure the public that the food they were eating met minimu...
A monopoly exists when a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it. A monopoly sells a good for which there is no close substitute. The absence of substitutes makes the demand for the good relatively inelastic thereby enabling monopolies to extract positive profits. It is this monopolizing of drug and process patents that has consumer advocates up in arms. The granting of exclusive rights to pharmacuetical companies over clinical a...
Somehow, when the meat industry found out about all this they were able to get articles published which defended present practices. Since Roosevelt was not able to exert the pressure he himself felt, he released a portion of the Neill-Reynolds report, which basically confirmed the truths of the packinghouse conditions that were depicted in The Jungle. It is my opinion that the fact that The Jungle could cause such a large industry to fight back powerfully attests to its own power as a persuasive medium.
Farmers from Nebraska and Alabama along with the Organization for Competitive Markets a national, non-profit public policy research and advocacy organization headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska, filed a lawsuit to sue the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the illegal rollback of the Farmer Fair Practice Rule on December 14.
During the 1990’s, some of the primary policies that had been put in place by the FCC to promote diversity of ownership of content in broadcasting were either eliminated or cut back. The Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (Fin-Syn) were repealed and the consent decree was also abandoned, allowing networks to own as much programming as the wanted, this opened the floodgates to mergers with studios. Through several other policy changes, such as the 1992 Cable Consumer Protection Act and the Telecommunications Act of 1996, a vertically integrated, tight oligopoly emerged in the commercial television and video entertainment fields (Cooper, 2007)
Many businesses used this new process to raise the price of their competitors. They did this by putting constraints on entry restrictions (Woods 1986). At the state level, other laws were put in place to support the Food and Drug Act mainly to help local and area producers who were and would be facing new nat...
The Square Deal was imposed on three essential ideas, known as the 3 C’s: control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservation. Roosevelt strived to make certain that corporations wouldn’t have complete control over their workers; the corporations needed to offer protection and basic rights to their workers. Although, corporations wished to stay cheap and maximize their profits, Roosevelt wouldn’t stand for it and forced changes using his “big stick”. This lead to Roosevelt’s reputation of being a “trust buster”, ignoring the fact that Taft and Wilson actually disbanded more trusts. Roosevelt’s second element of the square deal was consumer protection. Roosevelt’s first matter was involved with the regulation of food and drugs that were available to the public. Roosevelt read a book by Upton Sinclair, known as “The Jungle” which exposed Chicago’s slaughterhouse industry. As a result, Roosevelt influenced the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. The passing of these acts helped prevent the adulteration and the mislabeling
... government inspection of meat products. The Pure Food and Drug act also passed after the Meat inspection Act of 1906. The packers denied the charges and opposed the bills to no avail. These bills protected the publics right to safe sanitary meat.
The Jungle caused such an outcry that President Roosevelt tried to mandate government enforcement of sanitary and health standards in the food industry. After Congress wouldn’t pass a meat inspection bill, Roosevelt released the findings of the Neill-Reynolds report. The Neill-Reynolds’s report found that the meat packing industry was as horrendous as Sinclair claime...
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth’s contributions were in terms of the application of mathematics and statistics to economics (or, better, to the ‘moral sciences’). Below , I will be focusing on Edgeworth’s contribution to the oligopoly theory, emphasising on his ideas and themes that have developed from his work revolving around the concept of ‘indeterminacy’. Edgeworth explains the concept of indeterminacy, where it is the rule when there are a few agents present in the market that the outcomes be indeterminate, whereas when a large economy approaches perfect competition, the outcomes become determinate. Here, I would be explaining the oligopoly model with respect to the partial-equilibrium analysis and the effect on price and output of an oligopolistic