The bulk of economics is against you. In a competitive market, prices fall to the marginal cost of production. That's almost axiomatic. One only has to look to fashion markets, where the leading players have almost zero monopoly power and to PC hardware markets.
What you're implicitly advocating is setting prices without regard to market forces, without regard to the value that consumers place on a good, without regard to increasing efficiency of production via price competition. At best this is short sighted, at worst it kills entire markets.
In other words, the problem is not that people are allowed to pay different prices for different products, but rather the lack of a competitive marketplace? Now we're getting somewhere!
I agree with your larger points, but also arbitraging away price differences is valuable for a society. It feels like one of the big advantages capitalism has versus planned economies
When companies are cheaping out on labor and competing with other companies doing the same it is artificially lowering prices at the expense of the workers. If they all had to pay them more then prices would at worst go up around the board.
Therefore any price that people are unwilling to pay will not be because the competition offers a lower price, but because they are unwilling to purchase the product at all at that price. If that happens and it causes some businesses to be unviable because no one will pay the price required, then maybe we don't need those businesses.
It's always based on customers' willingness to pay, that's how capitalism works. It's just that the competition will make customers less willing to pay more.
It applies to almost all real-life markets. It's so standard that we don't even notice it happening, and focus on the exceptions. There is no level of economics you can reach where "competition drives down prices" stops being taken seriously; Nobel-winning left-wing economists like Stiglitz and Krugman accept that as true and relevant. So does Marx(!), who focuses on how lower costs are achieved at the expense of workers rather than capital holders.
Restaurants run at effectively zero margin. Lawn chairs and pencils and window blinds sell for essentially the cost of manufacturing and distribution. Even complex services like VOIP calling have moved from high profitable industries to "essentially free". Markets aren't inherently noble any more than they're inherently evil, but a major part of their value is that price-fixing hardly ever works.
Without appreciating that, we lose sight of just how strange healthcare (and college, and housing) are. When prices stay far above costs despite what presents itself as competition, there's something significant happening that deserves more attention.
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