I suppose if he misinterpreted the “cannot take advantage” clause, maybe…but that doesn’t change what he said, let alone make it accurate. You’ll notice I included basically the same statement you quoted in my own write up here on the forum. I would work with Caley’s statement only if you stopped after those first 11 words. You have to read the rest of the statement. “cannot ever take advantage of its situation to abuse consumers”. And then it goes on to basically explain how it cannot raise prices to achieve a profit rate significantly above the average across industry.
This says nothing about being more efficient and being able to lower your costs and therefore increasing your profit margin while keeping your prices the same (or even lowering them.)
Indeed, this was an advantage Standard Oil enjoyed (which made everyone better off) because it was able to charge lower prices for the product. Again, I highly encourage you to read my post on this.
Well that’s not what he said. I’m not really interested in constantly pontificating how different what people “really meant” is from what they actually said. I just take people at their word.
(cue someone to come in and tell us words don’t have real meanings, anything can mean anything, blah blah blah.)