Actually the galling part to me is the people who consider "Tribal Sovereignty" a clever loophole.
That's the point... the tribes have the right to decide what happens on their land. It's like calling "free speech" a loophole when someone notices the first amendement.
Its an interesting and creative strategy to a law from a bygone era currently abused to keep Tesla out of the market. Not only that, its investing in an economy that doesn't typically receive investment outside of gambling.
It's a good thing because it's a stupid law. People would praise any company that took advantage of this loophole. Though yes, other companies wouldn't get the headlines that Tesla gets for doing it.
I agree. That was my point - I meant that it shouldn't be news because we should be able to take it for granted that you can buy and sell stuff without being forced to use a middleman.
How stupid is it to try to stop e.g. Ford from undercutting existing Ford dealerships, and repatriating income and profit from e.g. NM back to e.g. MI ?
Stupid? I don't know. But it's legislation that forces the existence of a third-party middle man for sales and completely prevents the option of having it optimized away.
I believe that its intent was not to force the existence of 3rd party middlemen, but rather to acknowledge their existence (and the role they had played for manufacturers by assuming a large part of the risk), and prevent them from being swept away by direct sales after doing that.
I don't believe that this should apply to Tesla, because they do not use dealers anywhere.
Not at all. I'm just saying that if a manufacturer relied in the past on non-company owned businesses to establish markets, it's not clearly wrong to prevent the manufacturer from undercutting those businesses by opening company owned stores in the same locations.
I think that Tesla should be allowed to open a store wherever they want (subject to other rules & regulations), since they have never used dealers.
It's interesting to me that these are laws and not contract provisions between the dealers and the manufacturers.
Then again, way back when, dealers may have been the weaker party in contract negotiations, so the law was intended to protect them. That almost certainly isn't the case today, though, given the proliferation and (local) political power car dealerships tend to have.
Do you believe we should still have attendants everywhere to pump gas? That Netflix should still be distributing DVD's? That elevators should still be hand-operated?
It doesn't seem right to force an inefficient, outdated situation to continue to exist purely because it benefits a group that would otherwise be outcompeted.
