Really? What’s happening here?
I didn’t see anyone say anything about micromanaging the correct level of haggling that Costco does, presumably through government regulation.
If Costco doesn’t want to sell a product at x margin so that product doesn’t end up on its shelves, they’re rarely not selling a competitor, as Johnny himself posted earlier.
OK, but, like, sucks compared to what? They are far from the only retailer that squeezes suppliers. Ban retail I guess?
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But that’s the entire point if this derail. Thats what it was about!
As Wookie said, what theyre doing is no different from everywhere else. Even mom and pop stores.
You’re all awesome, but the number of strawmen being assembled ITT makes me feel like Jon Snow preparing for the wildling onslaught.
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It sucks compared to a free market where there is a large pool of buyers and sellers in all markets where no single entity has the kind of power that these immense retailers have. It really is econ-101, even though the “econ-101” people ignore that part.
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Lol you mad? You accusing someone else of distorting things is rich, but not as rich as “leftists” arguing against immigration, against housing, and against “socdem proposals” because of a longstanding beef with one guy.
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One nice thing that might come of this thread is if PVN keeps posting in it many of us are going to move up one slot in the UP liked posters power rankings.
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I haven’t read the book or listened to much discussion of it, but I gather that the idea behind the book is that we should just implement such things without massively increasing the population of America, but people are stupid, so Yglesias came up with an outrageous idea to create a context where people would be willing to talk about such things.
I find that yggy is very similar to Nate silver in that the people dunking on him are often just telling the world that the point completely went over their heads
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this is not at all my argument
I bet you do
Well, we don’t have anything like that, and changing the status quo would require immense government intervention and regulation. It also would require constant government maintenance, because the incentives for competing retailers to consolidate are substantial (increasing their bargaining position, removing redundant logistical costs, etc.). But outside of your utopia, does Costco suck compared to other retailers in the status quo? It doesn’t strike me as appreciably worse.
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How do we go about building support for immense government intervention and regulation?
Yes, it is worse. I don’t know if they are in WalMart/Amazon territory though.
Pvn was probably right about taxation though. It would probably just require things like Amazon paying more than 1.2% in corporate taxes and not immense government intervention. As it is there is effectively immense government intervention that favors megacorps. And it’s weird that anything that doesn’t include a relatively recent phenomenon (retail at this scale) is an unobtainable utopia.
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Yes, 100% agree.
That’s why I buy all three yoga mats and just ship back the two I like least.
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I haven’t seen a full blown pvn thread in years. I am very entertained. We used to get these like once or twice a week back in the day.
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One of my favorites from way back when on 2+2 was a post that PVN made that was very similar in nature to this “oh so you think socks are prices exactly right?” gotchas. It went something like this - someone posted about how government is good because it makes stuff like Central Park in NYC, and PVN said “Oh so you think government is so smart, and Central Park is so great? Why shouldn’t the government knock down all of Central Park West then and make more Central Park, huh?” I am probably mischaracterizing it but it was a pretty damn good debate generated by the ACists trying to insist that only the market could decide what the “right” amount of park in a city should be, and godforsaken statists making insane soviet apologist arguments like “public parks are good”.
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The central problem with AC-ism is property. There is no original owner of land and every monopolization of it is an aggression. By all rights the entire planet should be a park.
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I think we should try razing Central Park West and add the land to Central Park. What do we have to lose?
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