3 ms·
Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all. Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money
by kmeisthax 7mo ago
Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all.
Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners.
Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances.
The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.
- R_D_Olivaw 7mo agoI really liked this. And you made me think of this current market trend where we can effectively beg for tips and donations from a small, roofed, and electrified domicile and you might even become famous, but if you do it out on the street, it's frowned upon and people are less willing to give.
- kmeisthax 7mo agoWell, in the former case, that's usually part of some kind of entertainment. Street performers do the same thing and get about the same proportion of people tipping - i.e. not much, but enough to make a living if you're lucky and savvy enough to hustle the system.
- refurb 7mo agoA free market is individuals and companies can willing enter whatever transaction they want. If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all. You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoBut then you don't need to have the restaurant at all, you just need to have the idea of a restaurant that sells the idea of a booking. Someone decides they want to pay £100 for a booking at Restaurant A, which actually only exists on paper, so now they have a restaurant booking. They can then trade that booking to you for some other amount of money, if they want to make a profit on it. How badly do you want to have a booking at Restaurant A? And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A? Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk. Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table. I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start. I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.
- endominus 7mo agoJust because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society at large. If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it. If it indeed benefits a few individuals massively while on net reducing utility to society, an argument can be made that society has a moral imperative to ban it. Hence the limitations on gambling, on alcohol and tobacco marketing/sales, etc.
- refurb 7mo ago> Just because a particular market is free doesn't mean it's useful to society Of course not. > If it's not useful to society, society has no moral reason to tolerate it Then it’s not a free market.