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I don't see how they would help. There's a common refrain among Reddit socialists and whatnot about the rich sitting on some mythical "pile of resources" that

by Natsu 6y ago

I don't see how they would help. There's a common refrain among Reddit socialists and whatnot about the rich sitting on some mythical "pile of resources" that needs to be redistributed, but even if you suppose that we guillotine the rich I don't think the poor can eat stock certificates. What are they going to do if they dismantle, say, Wal-Mart? Now all the people who worked there have no jobs and the people who shopped there have one less source of goods. Sure, we might be fine without it due to the alternatives, but once you go down that road, you find out that you've ripped up a complex system of logistics that moved goods to places that people wanted them and that you don't have any sort of replacement planned. But that's usually what happens in these revolutions, they rip everything apart and then try to replace it with something better and fail. But next time will always be better, right?

tsimionescu 6y ago
How about ripping Wal-Mart apart and replacing it with what existed before - many different shops, each owned by a local person, and many different logsitics networks, each also owned by someone in the area? People on the right often claim to be for the free market and for small, decentralized government, but then turn around and love big, centrally planned conglomerates,just as long as they are owned by share-holders and are ruled with an authoritarian hand.
- chii 6y ago
  each small store will have little bargaining power when it comes to their suppliers. therefore, each little store will end up paying "market price". Eventually, the small stores join up together to bargain for a wholesale price lower than market price to their suppliers, and thus earn a higher margin. ala, what you see at walmart today.
  - KozmoNau7 6y ago
    What you see with Walmart is singular entity, owned by an obscenely rich family, who can strong-arm any supplier into accepting their terms. They have the massive capital to build a megamart anywhere they want, and have it run at a loss for however long it takes to drive everyone out of business. This absolutely kills local businesses and funnels money out of the area, leaving only the low wages paid to the local Walmart staff. And because it's Walmart job or no job, people have no bargaining power. When small businesses form cooperatives for collective bargaining, they keep ownership local, they keep jobs local, and they keep the stores in the city centres running, which is better for pedestrian and public transit access, not to mention cafe life and local bars/eateries. Compare this to a megamart outside the city where you have no choice but to drive there. You get everything there and have no real reason to go into the city. As a consequence, city life dies out. Coops and associations work with the local shop owners and communities, whereas megacorps trample and replace them with cookie cutter faceless megamarts.
    - Natsu 6y ago
      Efficiency always drives out competition. There's still room for small merchants for anyone who doesn't mind paying the premium to shop there. But not many people are willing (or able) to pay that much extra to be greeted by a familiar local face. And no, I don't think the supply chains are actually more robust for local stores. I've had better luck at the local Wal-Mart than at other stores for TP and other hard-to-get items. If anything, early on, some people weren't checking the smaller stores, but after they got wiped out, they've yet to recover and yet Wal-Mart has. There are still supply chain issues, don't get me wrong, but mostly they're upstream a bit from the customers. Think of things like meat packing plants having trouble finding any way to operate safely or having a lot of production that had to shift from commercial packaging to retail packaging and distribution.
      - KozmoNau7 6y ago
        The problem is that this efficiency comes from being a huge corporation with a tight hold on the market. Not an outright monopoly, but with the ability to bleed money in some areas to outcompete smaller stores and the ability to negotiate big contracts by virtue of sheer clout in the market. Walmart is so big that it utterly dominates the market, to the detriment of everyone else. But because they're able to sell everything at the lowest price, people go there. It's impossible to compete with Walmart. It's a clear example of why the invisible hand of the free market is a dangerous myth.
        Natsu 6y ago
        How is Wal-Mart a monopoly? I can't name any single good there which can't be gotten elsewhere and they have plenty of competitors for any given product line. There are dozens of other places I can get clothes, groceries, sporting goods, tools, etc. You say it's impossible, but does Target no longer exist? They directly compete with pretty much everything Wal-Mart does and many other businesses compete with them on specific product lines. Economy of scale is not at all the same as monopoly power and conflating the two only makes your point more confused. Finally, the "invisible hand" is really just a survival of the fittest type effect. It's every bit as random and imperfect as that is in nature, but the effects are no less real, or we'd all be peasants living at 1800s level standards instead of typing to each other on a globe-spanning computer network. If anything, I'd say that Socialism is the dangerous myth. Always promising utopia, as if you can create a utopia with unconstrained mass murder from a Socialist revolution. If we were the right kind of people to live in that utopia, we'd be sharing our stuff willingly right now, not seeing talk of guillotines and forcibly taking stuff, as can be observed in this very story. The proper way to get closer to that would be to encourage people to share and be generous. As the song says, first it was a tragedy, now it's a farce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0
- Natsu 6y ago
  > How about ripping Wal-Mart apart and replacing it with what existed before - many different shops, each owned by a local person, and many different logsitics networks, each also owned by someone in the area? You underestimate, vastly, just what they've done to their supply chain, distribution network and logistics to make it that efficient and therefore cheap for their customers. It's part of the reason people switched from buying from local shops and went to them instead. I chose them as an example because business people know a lot about what they did and the general public doesn't have a clue. I don't even like Wal-Mart, but I'm also aware of some of the reasons they're so successful. They're literally studied by people who study supply chain management because of what they did, e.g. - https://www.skubana.com/walmart-leading-way/ https://www.skubana.com/walmart-leading-way/ I used them because it's fashionable to hate them, but anyone who knew what they had actually built that's not visible to the public would know that it's not something that you can just replace that easily. So that lets me separate the replies according to how informed they are. Finally, your attempt to connect large companies to "central planning" is at odds with the fact that one works and the other does not. Central planning doesn't work because different people have different needs and no single plan can accommodate so many unique individuals. I don't think you will find many businesses that aren't planned, but they're not managing so many unique needs, either. And in those times when they really do end up in a situation like that, they end up being spun off as separate companies for that very reason.
  - mcv 6y ago
    Those supply chains may be efficient and cheaper, but due to their massive cnetralisation and optimisation, they're also more vulnerable. Just yesterday there was a discussion here on food supply chains and how small-scale local supply chains were more robust in the face of the current crisis.
kart23 6y ago
It's not about dismantling walmart. At least from the 'socialist' point of view, its redistributing capital that is just sitting idle. For example, take away the majority of zucks and bezos stock, and just give it away evenly to the people. That's not dismantling the company, its just a redistribution of wealth that has been earned off the backs of middle class.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  The middle class signed up for the trades offered by zuck/bezos. Why are they owed?
  - kart23 6y ago
    I don't really agree with it, I'm just trying to explain the viewpoint. They're not owed in a fully capitalist system, but I can see some merit for the idea that inequality has gotten so bad that there needs to be external intervention to fix that, and redistribute the wealth that is currently concentrated in the top 1%. Giving normal people that money would be a good thing for the economy, and I can see some benefit to it. Now of course in practice it wouldn't be legal and getting that money from them would be near impossible, but its interesting in theory.
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      If you give them money, they'll spend it at Amazon and bezos will get it back. What's the point? The rich are the first to encourage a witch-hunt against the rich. It drives up business.
  - scelerat 6y ago
    I don't see how you can you say too many people "signed up" for the system we have. 99% are simply born into it with little to no understanding or bargaining power whatsoever. To the extent that consumers do have a choice, that is somewhat true, but the examples of Facebook and Amazon are as much incredible luck of being in the right place and the right time, exponential explosion of brand new modes of communication and commerce, and all kinds of unintended consequences. Again, to say the middle class "signed up" for this is hardly the case. At the very least there are issues of power and information imbalances. Take the example of someone comparing the price of something at Amazon and the same thing at a local bookstore and deciding that it's worth the $0.50 savings to go with Amazon. It is easy -- and incorrect -- to say, "well, they signed up for the massive corporate supply chain consolidation and the dissolution of many local economies' autonomy that transactions like this will precipitate when performed at a large scale." The average consumer simply doesn't have the access to data that corporate boards and politicians do, nor do they have the historical and statistical training to make an educated analysis of their implications. Finally, even though there are people and organizations who urge alternative consumer patterns, the reach and the volume of their message pales in comparison to the marketing, PR and advertising armies employed by large corporations and their political allies.

by Natsu 6y ago

tsimionescu 6y ago

How about ripping Wal-Mart apart and replacing it with what existed before - many different shops, each owned by a local person, and many different logsitics networks, each also owned by someone in the area? People on the right often claim to be for the free market and for small, decentralized government, but then turn around and love big, centrally planned conglomerates,just as long as they are owned by share-holders and are ruled with an authoritarian hand.

chii 6y ago
each small store will have little bargaining power when it comes to their suppliers. therefore, each little store will end up paying "market price". Eventually, the small stores join up together to bargain for a wholesale price lower than market price to their suppliers, and thus earn a higher margin. ala, what you see at walmart today.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  What you see with Walmart is singular entity, owned by an obscenely rich family, who can strong-arm any supplier into accepting their terms. They have the massive capital to build a megamart anywhere they want, and have it run at a loss for however long it takes to drive everyone out of business. This absolutely kills local businesses and funnels money out of the area, leaving only the low wages paid to the local Walmart staff. And because it's Walmart job or no job, people have no bargaining power. When small businesses form cooperatives for collective bargaining, they keep ownership local, they keep jobs local, and they keep the stores in the city centres running, which is better for pedestrian and public transit access, not to mention cafe life and local bars/eateries. Compare this to a megamart outside the city where you have no choice but to drive there. You get everything there and have no real reason to go into the city. As a consequence, city life dies out. Coops and associations work with the local shop owners and communities, whereas megacorps trample and replace them with cookie cutter faceless megamarts.
  - Natsu 6y ago
    Efficiency always drives out competition. There's still room for small merchants for anyone who doesn't mind paying the premium to shop there. But not many people are willing (or able) to pay that much extra to be greeted by a familiar local face. And no, I don't think the supply chains are actually more robust for local stores. I've had better luck at the local Wal-Mart than at other stores for TP and other hard-to-get items. If anything, early on, some people weren't checking the smaller stores, but after they got wiped out, they've yet to recover and yet Wal-Mart has. There are still supply chain issues, don't get me wrong, but mostly they're upstream a bit from the customers. Think of things like meat packing plants having trouble finding any way to operate safely or having a lot of production that had to shift from commercial packaging to retail packaging and distribution.
    - KozmoNau7 6y ago
      The problem is that this efficiency comes from being a huge corporation with a tight hold on the market. Not an outright monopoly, but with the ability to bleed money in some areas to outcompete smaller stores and the ability to negotiate big contracts by virtue of sheer clout in the market. Walmart is so big that it utterly dominates the market, to the detriment of everyone else. But because they're able to sell everything at the lowest price, people go there. It's impossible to compete with Walmart. It's a clear example of why the invisible hand of the free market is a dangerous myth.
      - Natsu 6y ago
        How is Wal-Mart a monopoly? I can't name any single good there which can't be gotten elsewhere and they have plenty of competitors for any given product line. There are dozens of other places I can get clothes, groceries, sporting goods, tools, etc. You say it's impossible, but does Target no longer exist? They directly compete with pretty much everything Wal-Mart does and many other businesses compete with them on specific product lines. Economy of scale is not at all the same as monopoly power and conflating the two only makes your point more confused. Finally, the "invisible hand" is really just a survival of the fittest type effect. It's every bit as random and imperfect as that is in nature, but the effects are no less real, or we'd all be peasants living at 1800s level standards instead of typing to each other on a globe-spanning computer network. If anything, I'd say that Socialism is the dangerous myth. Always promising utopia, as if you can create a utopia with unconstrained mass murder from a Socialist revolution. If we were the right kind of people to live in that utopia, we'd be sharing our stuff willingly right now, not seeing talk of guillotines and forcibly taking stuff, as can be observed in this very story. The proper way to get closer to that would be to encourage people to share and be generous. As the song says, first it was a tragedy, now it's a farce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0
Natsu 6y ago
> How about ripping Wal-Mart apart and replacing it with what existed before - many different shops, each owned by a local person, and many different logsitics networks, each also owned by someone in the area? You underestimate, vastly, just what they've done to their supply chain, distribution network and logistics to make it that efficient and therefore cheap for their customers. It's part of the reason people switched from buying from local shops and went to them instead. I chose them as an example because business people know a lot about what they did and the general public doesn't have a clue. I don't even like Wal-Mart, but I'm also aware of some of the reasons they're so successful. They're literally studied by people who study supply chain management because of what they did, e.g. - https://www.skubana.com/walmart-leading-way/ https://www.skubana.com/walmart-leading-way/ I used them because it's fashionable to hate them, but anyone who knew what they had actually built that's not visible to the public would know that it's not something that you can just replace that easily. So that lets me separate the replies according to how informed they are. Finally, your attempt to connect large companies to "central planning" is at odds with the fact that one works and the other does not. Central planning doesn't work because different people have different needs and no single plan can accommodate so many unique individuals. I don't think you will find many businesses that aren't planned, but they're not managing so many unique needs, either. And in those times when they really do end up in a situation like that, they end up being spun off as separate companies for that very reason.
- mcv 6y ago
  Those supply chains may be efficient and cheaper, but due to their massive cnetralisation and optimisation, they're also more vulnerable. Just yesterday there was a discussion here on food supply chains and how small-scale local supply chains were more robust in the face of the current crisis.

kart23 6y ago

It's not about dismantling walmart. At least from the 'socialist' point of view, its redistributing capital that is just sitting idle. For example, take away the majority of zucks and bezos stock, and just give it away evenly to the people. That's not dismantling the company, its just a redistribution of wealth that has been earned off the backs of middle class.

friendlybus 6y ago
The middle class signed up for the trades offered by zuck/bezos. Why are they owed?
- kart23 6y ago
  I don't really agree with it, I'm just trying to explain the viewpoint. They're not owed in a fully capitalist system, but I can see some merit for the idea that inequality has gotten so bad that there needs to be external intervention to fix that, and redistribute the wealth that is currently concentrated in the top 1%. Giving normal people that money would be a good thing for the economy, and I can see some benefit to it. Now of course in practice it wouldn't be legal and getting that money from them would be near impossible, but its interesting in theory.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    If you give them money, they'll spend it at Amazon and bezos will get it back. What's the point? The rich are the first to encourage a witch-hunt against the rich. It drives up business.
- scelerat 6y ago
  I don't see how you can you say too many people "signed up" for the system we have. 99% are simply born into it with little to no understanding or bargaining power whatsoever. To the extent that consumers do have a choice, that is somewhat true, but the examples of Facebook and Amazon are as much incredible luck of being in the right place and the right time, exponential explosion of brand new modes of communication and commerce, and all kinds of unintended consequences. Again, to say the middle class "signed up" for this is hardly the case. At the very least there are issues of power and information imbalances. Take the example of someone comparing the price of something at Amazon and the same thing at a local bookstore and deciding that it's worth the $0.50 savings to go with Amazon. It is easy -- and incorrect -- to say, "well, they signed up for the massive corporate supply chain consolidation and the dissolution of many local economies' autonomy that transactions like this will precipitate when performed at a large scale." The average consumer simply doesn't have the access to data that corporate boards and politicians do, nor do they have the historical and statistical training to make an educated analysis of their implications. Finally, even though there are people and organizations who urge alternative consumer patterns, the reach and the volume of their message pales in comparison to the marketing, PR and advertising armies employed by large corporations and their political allies.