I get that late stage capitalism is a problem for anarcho-capitalist ideology. Doesn’t mean it’s not a real thing.
ah yes the “plastic straws are ruining the environment” baloney.
dude the environment is getting fucked up by much, much larger forces than whatever you think happens when the price of socks drops by 0.5%. You’re essentially blaming poor people for problems way outside of their control.
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ok well to answer your question, obviously you have never had to choose between buying food and buying clothing.
I get the feeling that @pvn has a very intense foot fetish that is somehow playing into this. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
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This just sounds like the standard “yes it sucks in the short term but things will work out in the long term” argument. But like, in the long term we’re all dead, and there are tons of possible short term cycles where different sock producers get screwed because they never thought someone would actually fuck them that hard when they signed the contract.
Costco doesn’t want to find some happy equilibrium with a sock supplier, they want to skin a bunch of different people for all they’re worth and then make their own socks when they can’t find anymore suckers.
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This is a massively stupid, disingenuous, and bad-faith post. Everyone, including you, knew that up to this point “socks” was just an example standing in for all consumer goods, consumer culture, and all the materials and energy that goes into it, and now you’re going to say something about plastic straws.
I see why you have the undertitle you have
it’s not at all in bad faith. basically your argument is that poor people should remain poor because you can’t figure out how to solve some other problem if they’re allowed to have nice things
Do you think pvn doesn’t think this includes other products?
It’s odd we’re treating “large companies use their scale and resources as leverage” as news and not common sense.
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Seems like concern trolling, but whatever, you can deny that. But it is stupid ACist absolutism. There are options in the world between $100 for a pair of hand-made socks and the market perfection of an infinitesimal margin on all products.
essentially a bunch of people in this thread are arguing that specialization and trade are bad and comparative advantage doesn’t exist. This is like the flat earth stuff of economics.
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I disagree with this. The ideal behind a free market economy is that companies make money by coordinating labor and resources that are valued at X on the market and transforming them into products that are valued at Y and Y-X = profit = increase in economic value to society. In this model, superwealthy people are great because all that money they make corresponds to creating real wealth for everyone else. This is obviously not how things actually work, but the aim of a well-regulated market economy should be to get as close to this ideal as possible.
The problem isn’t the existence of the extremely greedy and driven people, but that our rules allow them to make money in ways that are actually detrimental to society and decrease wealth for others. Getting rid of greedy people is not a viable solution, the goal should be to establish a set of regulations where nonproductive actions, like fucking over employees and polluting and lobbying the government for favors are not profitable, with severe enough punishments for those who violate the rules that it is --EV to do so.
All of this is totally impossible while we have a system of government where the superwealthy get to write the rules themselves, resulting in a self-reinforcing cycle of increasingly predatory behavior.
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mending socks doesn’t solve your sock problem. where did you get the socks you’re mending?
we are like 4 posts away from overt population control advocacy
Wrong. And you should get past an econ 101 understanding of the world. What’s good to a certain degree isn’t necessarily good to an infinite degree.
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Lol. How dare someone be anti-consumption!!! The monsters!!!
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I mean, yea. This is basically a chicken and egg situation. Like lefty vs centrist technocrat is greedy people vs the system is the problem.
But like, if billionaires didn’t still think they needed more, then the system wouldn’t matter.
Maybe it was just stupid.
Reducing the point about environmental harm that is really happening to “ah yes the ‘plastic straws are ruining the environment’ baloney.” is definitely either stupid or in bad faith. You are either a denier (an idiot) and/or trolling.
No one is treating it as news. It’s being treated as something that it sometimes destructive. Hell, despite what all the econ-101 idiots cry about, Adam Smith wrote like a million pages about how this sort of thing goes bad without even getting into environmental destruction.
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It can be simultaneously true both that cheap goods are essential for poor families and that hyper-consumerism is burning up the planet.
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