State that profit is revenue minus marginal cost. Then it should be
obvious that to extract profit, a manager must do any (or both) of
two things:

- Underpay work		(give the worker less than he would gain on
			 a perfect market)
- Oversell the product  (demand more from the consumers than would
			 be dictated by a perfect market)

For these disparities, denote the former work profit and the latter
sales profit.

Classical economic theory says that the presence of multiple
competitors will work so that the limit of any of these disparities
goes towards zero as time goes to infinity.

However, one should take into consideration inequality of power as
well. Inequalities of power between competitors, which can arise from
a number of sources can, when compounded enough, be used to squeeze
other competitors out of the market.

Similarily, inequality of power between the workers and the rest of the
company can be used to force them to accept lower payments, especially
if such power exercise is done collusively.

(In essence, collusion is the temporary combination of the power
inequality of the members of a group with regards to another group;
e.g two corporations (the first group) wrt workers (the second group))

So there is little problem with a perfect market, as long as there's
an external limiter (a gear, so to speak) with which the people can
regulate between (work and much luxuries) and (little work and less
luxury). But a perfect market doesn't exist, and as long as there is
power inequality, it cannot ever exist.

It seems impossible, short of creating a mega-organism (of which
everybody would be an equal part and thus "playing nice" is selfish),
then to attain a perfect market.

-

Let us further consider that the people can be influenced to either
work or consume more, limited on the upper end by three factors - time,
self defense, and accessible means.


The time restriction is obvious enough -- one cannot work 25 hours a
day if there are only 24 hours. Moreover, one cannot work 23 hours a
day if people die if they get less than 8 average hours of sleep each
day, though that crosses into accessible means.

Accessible means is also relatively simple. Consider consumers; they
need a given amount of money (or whatever tokens are used) simply
to survive, and no matter how much money they have, they cannot consume
as much as to deplete this given amount. In a similar way, workers
cannot work for less than survival wages, or more broadly, a wage that
allows for enough material wealth for a worker to on average recover
enough that he can still work the next day.

Finally we have self defense. This is basically the inverse of
susceptibility to manipulation regardless of source. Implied in this
term is that any member of the population can internally defend himself
more consciously, expending energy to raise self defense. (The
hypothetical Randian libertarian would engage in such behavior to
create an additional pressure on the market - this is what is meant
by a "well-informed rational being"; however, past some point the
gains become too small, and it seems few would like to constantly
have their metaphorical guard up).


Now we can see that economics of scale notwithstanding, the incentive
for a company to engage in such influencing of the public is directly
linked to the profit of whatever this company is distributing. 
Interestingly, if profit is zero and hence revenue is exactly equal to
marginal cost, then the incentive disappears as each new instance of
demand raises the absolute marginal cost (sum over all products)
just enough to swallow up the added revenue.

The extent to which a company that is a part of a perfect market would
influence the public is then given by the nonlinearity of profit,
or economics of scale. As these effects exist, even a perfect market
would become flooded with such influencing factors.

(Note that the influence aspect towards consumers cannot be mapped
totally to marketing; some aspect, though a tiny one at that, is of
information that has two purposes - first, to make self defense easier,
and second, to show the existence of a product to satisfy a 
preexisting demand. Rather, the influencing is given by the degree
it is possible to feed the population false information).

-

If members of the society act in a game-theoretically optimal way,
and each values himself differently from the rest of the population,
and these are the only values he considers when deciding to make a
work-money change, then

to the extent that he values himself more than the rest, or products
are distributed to those who need them, he will work less,

and to the extent that he values the rest more, or products are
distributed according to ability, he will work more.

Thus inasfar as this model is predictive, it is easy to see that those who value themselves over others would consider distribution a bad thing, and vice versa, except in the case where distribution would benefit themselves, either because they are less well off than the median, or because they are more so if the lack of distribution would drive crime to unmanagable levels as those less well off battle for
survival.

-