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In my opinion, capitalism in its purest form must thrive on misery (as it must exploit essential needs). This is what a truly free market implies. What I find
by gboudrias 9y ago
In my opinion, capitalism in its purest form must thrive on misery (as it must exploit essential needs). This is what a truly free market implies.
What I find interesting (though I don't think this is the point you're making), is that there are still people defending this obvious flaw and marketing it as a feature. But once essential needs are met (i.e. housing, food and security), what's even left? Luxuries, I guess. But even that can vary drastically between periods and societies (is gas a luxury? is higher education a luxury?).
And yet here we are.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- nine_k 9y agoThe thing is that other forms have been tried. It turns out that unless a form of society does not have enough capitalist underpinnings, it indeed thrives in misery of most people: North Korea, Soviet bloc, religious tyrannies, aristocracy with indentured servitude, etc.
- skrause 9y agoYou can have a system that is somewhere between "capitalism in its purest form" and "communism". When both extremes thrive on misery, why not try some kind of middle ground?
- baq 9y agoYou've described China and lo and behold most people live in misery there.
- skummetmaelk 9y agoThat is quite a bold statement with no proof.
- noobermin 9y agoChina isn't really a communist country at all, it is much closer to state capitalism.
- tradersam 9y agoThat's kind of what we already have in the U.S., a mixed economy[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy
- esolyt 9y agoThat is actually what we are doing. The problem is we can't decide on where the middle ground is.
- pcrh 9y agoIt isn't capitalism that prevents abuse of power by the wealthy. It's liberal democracy, and human rights enshrined in laws that are enforced.
- nine_k 9y agoFreedom of trade and property rights are hard to separate from other liberal freedoms and rights. Capitalism sort of follows.
- pcrh 9y agoBut you can have capitalism without free trade, or even many rights at all. Liberal freedoms and rights tend to favor capitalism as an economic system, but not the other way around.
- ThrustVectoring 9y agoCapitalism thrives on misery only as much as it alleviates it. That's what an increase in prices is - a sign that people are desperate for something and willing to handsomely reward whoever will provide it. It's why I'm in favor of legalizing price gouging - if someone goes to great personal effort, risk, and expense to buy electrical generators and drive them into a disaster area, that's a good thing and should be rewarded. And when the area has enough generators, the price will fall and the gouging will stop. The thing we do have to watch out for is deliberately creating a need so that the entrepreneur can swoop in and fill it. I suppose this also applies to many forms of advertising, game design, and website design though, too.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- skummetmaelk 9y agoOh please. Is there great personal risk involved in raising ticket prices to 6000 dollars on flights that would fly anyway? Is there great personal risk in raising the price of life or death medicine to 750 dollars per pill?
- mikedh 9y agoWell the fact that demand and prices were higher during the evacuation of Florida meant that airlines were incentivised to have more flights out. It seems like this directly resulted in the huge volume of flights headed to and from Florida, which meant more people were able to evacuate by plane. And those people weren't clogging up the highway so people who couldn't afford tickets also ended up better off. How was the "price gouging" in this case not an unequivocal good on the macro level? It seems the alternative is that the airlines held prices fixed but ran out of supply immediately.
- yladiz 9y agoYou're ignoring inelastic demand, which would happen in the case of a disaster area. If a company is one of or the only company that can bring something important/necessary like generators to a disaster site, and the company knows this, it will charge more than is fair, e.g. more than the cost of the generator plus the expenses of transporting them. Price gouging generally hurts the people that need the product the most because they have no choice, and many people consider it unethical in cases like disasters. This situation is similar to the economics of life saving medicine, because its demand is also inelastic. Also I don't think it's fair to use the term "someone", because it's often a company that does something like this. Don't humanize companies.