> I could just as easily say, "The good argument for having a maximum 'price of bread' is that without it, bread prices will be pressured up, because every bakery on the planet wants prices as high as possible, and they generally have the means to achieve it."
You could certainly just as easily say that, but there's an obvious reason why it isn't true: so long as there are multiple suppliers and it's possible to produce bread in quantities sufficient to more than supply the population, each supplier can benefit from undercutting the prices offered by the others and capturing a larger share of the market, and this drives down prices to relatively near the cost of production. (As for the case when it's not possible to produce enough bread, take a look at the history of rationing during wartime and why it existed.) This argument simply doesn't apply to the comment you're replying to.
A race to the bottom only happens with fungible goods, where any price differential is sufficient to completely dominate purchasing logic. There is a very broad spread in the quality of bread, and people's purchasing decisions are heavily weighted by product marketing.
That rather depends on how much people can afford to spend on bread. At least here in the UK, there's been a massive rise in the popularity of discount supermarkets like Aldi and Lidl which sell their own off-brand products that's gone hand in hand with the economic crisis. Also, it doesn't require a complete race to the bottom to ensure that bread is available at a reasonable price and the existence of premium brands doesn't cause non-premium bread to disappear.
You could certainly just as easily say that, but there's an obvious reason why it isn't true: so long as there are multiple suppliers and it's possible to produce bread in quantities sufficient to more than supply the population, each supplier can benefit from undercutting the prices offered by the others and capturing a larger share of the market, and this drives down prices to relatively near the cost of production. (As for the case when it's not possible to produce enough bread, take a look at the history of rationing during wartime and why it existed.) This argument simply doesn't apply to the comment you're replying to.