Meanwhile in Sweden
Meanwhile in Sweden
That's $3 for 15 eggs. Sadly not free-range, only cage-free.
Not sure if this is the best community for this post, does anyone have a better suggestion?
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You know how people can not say things but those things are still true?
Price gouging is similar to profiteering but can be distinguished by being short-term and localized and by being restricted to essentials such as food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and equipment needed to preserve life and property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_gouging
This was not localized or short-term.
But apparently you are very big on "hail corporate" capitalism, so I clearly will not be able to convince you that corporations may possibly not have your best interests in mind.
corporations may possibly not have your best interests in mind.
I 100% agree with that, but that doesn't make then evil in much the same way that a bear isn't evil even though it wants to maul you.
Corporations are greedy and exist to maximize profit. They can sometimes appear to align with your interests, but that's not because some corporations are "good" and others are "evil," but because their selfish incentives happen to align with your selfish incentives.
In other words, if a corporation is abusing the system, we need to fix the system, not the corporation. Price gouging shouldn't be illegal, it should be unprofitable. Making it illegal means trusting politicians and judges to be incorruptible, whereas making it unprofitable fixes itself. That's hard, but it'll be a lot more effective.
Your idea to use capitalism to fight capitalism is noted.
Something tells me it's already been tried. Over and over. For around three centuries.
And it has worked reasonably well, on net, for those centuries. As Winston Churchill popularized:
it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time
The same can be said for capitalism. Politicians think the answer lies in regulation, but that leads to cronyism, which is to blame for most of the crap we deal with.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying "deregulate all the things," I'm saying we need to be arresting and jailing execs instead of fining companies (and increasing fines), busting up monopolies, etc. If that means we need to remove some regulations and whatnot, fine, but dramatically increase the penalties for breaking the law. Government needs to be as separate as possible from the market to be effective, just like a coach can't be a good referee when their team is on the field.
Yes, again, your pro-capitalist views are noted. And they explain a lot.
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If you have a suggestion for a system that is proven to work better and not devolve into authoritarianism (or at least not as quickly), I'm all ears.
I think we're better off fixing the system we have, which to me means:
- more worker unions
- harsher penalties for law-breaking corporations
- trust busting
- less money in politics (and less interference in the market)
Throwing everything out and trying something new more often results in authoritarianism and/or poverty than freedom and prosperity.
Why does it have to have been proven to work better in order to try it? What a regressive way of looking at the world.
Because changing a whole economic/government system has proven to have a very high chance of failure, resulting in people being even worse off. For every success story, there are dozens of failures.
So unless you have a gradualist/reformist approach that either has been proven or is easy to back out of, I'm not interested.
What a regressive way of looking at the world.
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