<<<It looks like free enterprise to me. They got mad when I asked them to explain why it's wrong. Can you?>>>
I want to try.
You can see that if the sellers and auctioneers went to the trouble of getting everyone to sign written contracts stipulating that the Rules of the Auction prohibit the audience, the potential bidders, from colluding to control the selling price, that it would be wrong, then, after signing the agreement, to collude.
And if you define an auction as it has traditionally been defined, as a particular, or specific, method for determining the fairest price (that being, by this definition, the price that the individual who most wants the item is willing to pay,) you see that the reason it is wrong is because there is, in fact, a contract-- only it has not been necessary for it to be a written one, all these generations, because by gentlemen's/ladies' civilized agreement, collusion did not take place, or was recognized as dishonest when it did. (And did seldom enough and informally enough that the auctioning mechanism itself was not perceived as intrinsically broken.)
This arrangement, or understanding, is one of the many informal contracts which, in their totality, are referred to, in shorthand, as the "social contract." This sort of collusion, at the supposedly transparent enterprise of auctioning off items to the highest bidder, is what we mean, I think, when we bemoan the erosion, in our culture, of the social contract. |
