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> we have decided life's necessities should be sold to you with a healthy profit margin First, profit margins on things like groceries are pretty small. That's

• psd1 3y ago
  GP did not articulate their point well, but you've straw-manned them about groceries. GP specifically enumerated housing, healthcare, transport etc - not groceries. I assume HN users are American unless informed otherwise. I'm glad that your health insurance bureaucrats can make a salary, but it's nonsense to believe that's a good way to run a society, even if it is profitable for some or can be deemed to be "free-market provision". There are better models that still generate income for pharma and doctors and nurses. America made the car part of its identity. Your society was moulded by automotive lobbying in the twentieth century, on the hill and in town planning. It's great that car makers can generate income, but they've mugged you. All the mandatory spending on that sector could be optional, and the rational actors in your economy could use that money to maximise their personal profit functions in a way that encourages entrepreneurs to create new value. It simply should not cost six figures to turn a school graduate into a doctor or lawyer. It's great that universities generate income and employ people, but you made bad choices there. A professor spends 10-20 hours a week teaching a class of fifty - research grants come from industry - where's the fucking money gone? House builders deserve to get paid, but when you condemn a generation to rent slavery, you curtail their economic activity, making yourselves much poorer collectively and individually than you would be if your young could afford to take part in other parts of the economy. It's not like your rent-seekers can't cream income from other capital investments, there are ways to turn money into more money that increase liquidity for businesses. Housing isn't mandated by the laws of the universe to be an income stream. If we translate Maslow's pyramid into goods and services, at the bottom we have groceries - which moooost people can afford, yay, you win a point; then housing, which is touch-and-go for a large minority; then leisure time and retirement planning and non-vocational education, which are enjoyed by only the wealthy. And this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist... where the individuals in question are specifically rich and powerful ones. So you have apparently phenomenal GDP per capita but only 90% functional literacy, and lots of you die indigent because you got cancer. That GDP, I assert, is fucking fictitious. I'm sure America is rich one way or the other but it looks like the books are being cooked. If you claim that a university degree is $50k then your claim of $50k GDP is bollocks. Where is the actual production that you write down as $10k for having a broken arm set? John Galt shat in your mouths and you're calling it stew. Sorry if this rambled. GP, please let me know if I've fleshed out your point or missed it entirely.
  • pdonis 3y ago
    > GP specifically enumerated housing, healthcare, transport etc - not groceries. The post I responded to mentioned "food" as well as the other things you list. Last I checked, "groceries" is food. I focused on groceries because they are closer to being in a free market than any of the other things you mention, all of which are more heavily regulated by the government and therefore are more inefficiently and wastefully provided than groceries are. If we want to talk about giving everyone easy access to "life's necessities", it seems obvious that making the provision of those necessities more efficient, hence making them cheaper and easier to afford, would be a good thing to do. That means making all those other things more like groceries in the way we provide them. That might well decrease the per-unit profit on such things--which is why I pointed out that profit margins on groceries are pretty small. That's what free markets do: they drive profit margins down, not up, through competition. Most of the rest of your post is simply uninformed about how things in the US actually work. I'll focus on one particular statement of yours to make that clear: > this is because pretty much every move your country makes is individualistic instead of collectivist Quite the contrary: things that are a mess in the US are a mess because of too much collectivism, not too little. To take your two major examples: The US health care system is a mess because the people who actually have to make decisions about care--patients and doctors--have no idea what the care they are deciding about actually costs. All those costs are hidden--negotiated collectively behind the scenes by large corporations who have no skin in the game in individual cases, which is where the availability and quality of care actually matters. How can people possibly make decent tradeoffs of benefit vs. cost when providing or receiving care if they can't see and control the costs? Housing is a mess in the US because much, if not most, urban and suburban planning was done from the top down, by collectivist central decree, instead of from the bottom up, evolving as individual choices and interactions shaped communities. (In Europe, by contrast, most cities and towns developed from the bottom up, and hence were much more suitable for introduction of a few top-down things like mass transit when those became available, because the top-down planners had the benefit of centuries of bottom-up evolution of communities.)
    • psd1 3y ago
      Ha, my reading comprehension fail - I missed that GP explicitly said food. I apologise for saying you were straw-manning, your comment was apposite. I think where you and I differ is that you define action by any organisation, be it pharma corp or city government, to be ipso facto collectivist, whereas I will characterise actions by organisations and individuals as individualistic or collectivist on a case-by-case basis. I agree with the principle of individual agency in the default case, but town planning is a prime example where this doesn't work - absent a population with a strong collectivist culture. I've spent time in a rural part of Spain and, please know, the towns are a mess - traffic arteries go down to one lane and detour around houses that someone decided to build where they pleased. It only takes one individual to ruin a good thing. In terms of healthcare, your thesis would stand a hundred years ago, when medical skill was the prime differentiator and drugs were simple and cheap. That is not the case today. For any given condition, the treatment is often a monopoly or has little competition. Abuse of monopoly - a fundamentally individualistic behaviour, as I see it - is one of the elements that makes American healthcare such an international joke. These companies have a captive market, and the cost of entry is enormous. Respectfully, the idea that what you need is _more_ individualism does not stand up to inspection. You may have individualism as your highest value, in which case avoidable death in penury is a price you are willing to pay. Most of the world finds that incomprehensible. The common solution in other countries is single-payer. This has the disadvantage that it levies the healthy to pay for the sick, but the advantage that the levy is affordable. It's not as if there is no benefit to the healthy - it is valuable in itself to live free from medical worry. Did you know that the public cost of the US healthcare system per capita vastly exceeds that of every other nation, despite Americans _also_ paying thousands every year in private insurance? Your principle is a very expensive one. And it's not as if pharma is struggling in Europe. Strange hill to literally die on.
• swatcoder 3y ago
  If only things were so simple as suggested by the 60 year old textbooks! Supermarket chains are heavily consolidated because they can use a high margin on unnecessary luxuries like packaged foods and off-season produce to undercut local grocers who had otherwise been profitable selling seasonal produce and regional meat. “But clearly, consumers end up ahead if the necessities are cheaper at the supermarket!” you say. But of course, with a supermarket organized to maximize profit rather than contribute to a community, they do everything they can to empty the consumers wallet. The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise. Then, instead of the money folding back back into the local community and local farmers/ranchers, it goes to investors at Nestle and Mars and to industrial farming operations in some distant hemisphere. Given the importance of food and it’s affordability, everything about highly consolidated supermarkets is bad. Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!
  • pdonis 3y ago
    > The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise. If only things were so black and white as suggested by your rhetoric. A consumer who buys the same things as they were buying before, just at cheaper prices, is better off, even by your criteria. Nobody holds a gun to people's heads and forces them to buy "unnecessary luxuries". A consumer who chooses to spend additional money on what you are pleased to call "unnecessary luxuries" that they could not buy at all before, because nobody was selling them, is also better off--not by your gerrymandered criterion, but by the standard criterion of economists, from those "60 year old textbooks" to today: they have options they didn't have before, and they are choosing to exercise those options. That is what "wealth" is--people having more choices. > Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism! I said "free market", not capitalism. They're not the same thing. Large supermarket chains happen to be an example of both, but not all examples work out that way. In fact, even the large supermarket chain example is not completely a free market example, because the government messes with food prices by subsidizing particular food crops in order to favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. To the extent that helped to enable large supermarket chains to undercut local grocery stores, that is an illustration of capitalism being against free markets.