When Walmart comes into a small town and uses it’s economies of scale to force smaller stores to shut down because they have the ability to operate at a loss, is this choice?
Walmart has a board of executives that decide on the direction of the company, it’s a corporation the performs central planning in order to maximize profits.
Yes, the townspeople are choosing to shop at the market that has the best prices/best selection/whatever else walmart has that makes it preferable to other stores. Walmart's executives set their prices based on the cost to get products. Prices constantly change in reaction to supply and demand.
You seem to have figured out though that markets don't work without competition. Luckily the grocery market, at least in most places, is robustly competitive. And the government should step in when that is not the case.
Wallmart workers famously cannot even afford to pay Wallmart prices for their foods. How are townspeople (many of which are Wallmart workers) supposed to pay higher prices for their food when they can’t even afford the lowest price?
This data is somewhat misrepresented. To be eligible for SNAP benefits, you have to also work (unless you get an exemption, like for caretaking). So the government is trying to get people off SNAP for pushing them to work, then shaming the employer for hiring people on SNAP. Walmart is a common low skill entry level job, so not a surprise that a lot of SNAP beneficiaries end up there.
The top employers that have SNAP beneficiaries also include the USPS, Amazon, Home Depot, Publix, Uber, McDonalds, Krogers...
It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a better one. I mean I agree that our system isn't perfect, or even that good, but no system is. Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death.
If the labor market is a monopsony, as it commonly is in small towns, the government should step in.
> It's a market. If you don't like your job look for a better one.
Sure! I live in a small rural town with a poor public education system and no professional opportunities outside of manual labor. I had to leave high school to work to support my family. The most I can make is minimum wage, which means that I cannot afford basic necessities. What "better" jobs am I able to choose from? Or do I have to wait for "the government" to step in so my family doesn't starve?
Great! Where am I going to get money to move from a small town to a city with a higher cost of living, and how will I - a high-school dropout - acquire the skills necessary to get one of these better jobs? How long will it take? Where will I live? How will my family survive without my income?
You know the vast majority of history is nothing but death and despair right? You can’t expect other people to solve your problems for you. At some point you have to accept that waiting for life to come to you will result in poverty, that is true of the 99.99999999% of people in every society ever. I get that it’s not fun to confront the harshness of reality, but your comments really do make it seem like you’re expecting people who don’t take initiative to just have things handed to them(to be clear I have no problem just handing people basic necessities such as food and healthcare, but good jobs are a privilege, not a right).
Acting like being in small town America is an economic tragedy is a gigantic insult to the millions of people who sacrificed everything to migrate to the developed world, and those people are largely extremely good at lifting themselves out of poverty when they arrive. Why are locals less economically mobile?
There has never been a more prosperous time to be alive than right now in western countries, we need to continue to work to make life better for everyone society, but there is no magic solution other than hard work.
There are many tings in here that should be addressed, including simple respect for other people, and recognition of varying economic status, and the reality of impoverishment.
However I want to address the migration question. As an immigrant my self I take offense that you suggest that people migrate to “the developed world” (ugh!) in search of prosperity. This is a great simplification, and kind of a regurgitation of a popular belief which isn’t true. Most people—including my self—migrate because of family, second is jobs and education, these are people that already have a job or have been admitted to school and come on a special worker or school visas. Majority of immigrants don’t sacrifice everything, just proximity to family and friends, and most use their existing wealth to make the migration as easy as possible. In fact demonstrating financial viability is a precondition for permanent residency, meaning by far majority immigrants who can’t afford to migrate, or don’t have a job or a scholarship awaiting them, are forbidden by law from staying.
Immigrants who sacrifice everything off course exists, and refugees in particular take great risks while migrating, but they are a minority, and there is not exactly prosperity awaiting them, rather, a hope for a safer place to live. Many refugees have decades of poverty awaiting them in their host country, the more social services they get, the easier it is for them to actually escape poverty.
The United States has millions of illegal immigrants who did sacrifice everything to walk thousands of miles to get here. I’ve talked to many, they have all been extremely grateful for the opportunities the free market here has provided them. And obviously I agree we should people be successful. But complaining that there aren’t any jobs in your shit hole town isn’t a mindset that will get you anywhere. If the only job available to you is Walmart you should move, and finish high school too tbh. It really is that simple, and I’m kind of over the entitlement I see from these small town people expecting the world he handed to them. Because the reality is this country has plenty of decent, if not great, jobs that are certainly better than almost any person ever has had access too.
DHS—a very biased institution that has benefits of inflating the number—estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants residing in the USA in 2018 (the most recent number I could find), the foreign born population that same year was estimated at 36 million, meaning undocumented were at most one third of all immigrants. By far majority of the 11 million undocumented came from Mexico or central America. The path to legal status is extremely difficult from those countries and it is reasonable to assume majority of them would had taken the legal route if possible and had indeed family and/or jobs awaiting them across the border. While some may indeed have sacrificed everything, I very much doubt that figure is much higher than in the hundreds of thousands.
But than again, listen to what you are saying. Do you honestly want to live in a society where people are asked to “sacrificed everything” just because they happened to be born and raised a poor part of the country? Would you honestly prefer people struggle all of their childhood and most of their lives as young adults, only to than be forced to abandon their entire family, just to have maybe a shot at a better life? It may just be me, but I honestly would prefer there to be regulations and social services in place such that these lives are made easier.
Rural economies being fucked isn't capitalism's fault. If you don't create valuable things you won't get valuable things, that's true in all economic systems. If you want valuable things you should probably move somewhere where they are being created and get a job there. Forcing rural people to move to urban areas and work in factories is a classic communism move because it turns out people are more productive when near each other. Capitalism just gives people the choice of doing that or staying where they are and being poorer.
Allowing poverty to exist really has nothing to do with capitalism the economic system and everything to do with the political climate in society. Capitalism is just free markets and property rights, it doesn't say anything about government redistribution. Getting rid of markets would not help poor people at all.
You seem to conveniently ignore the externalities that most people who have investigated them agree are a major component in a corporation like Walmart existing at all.
I would agree with most of what you've written if the price of goods at Walmart actually represented their true cost. But instead, Walmart relies on externalities (the most obvious one is their reliance on their staff being able to collect various forms of public assistance, but there are plenty more) in order to maintain their prices.
Just for the record, the article in which thread spun from is about the socialist question. It is asking whether there is a reason to your mentality. That is, is it worth it to regulate economies and set up social services such that people don’t have to live at the whims of free market capitalism.
Unsurprisingly for an alumni of the Chicago school the author believes this is still an open question, however this article is kind of well written and everything up to the conclusion—that is the historical breakdown of this question—seems to indicate that socialism is good actually, and Laissez-faire capitalism is bad.
> Planned economies consistently lead to famine and tens of millions of people starving to death.
They do not. Cuba has yet to experience a famine despite being under a severe embargo for several decades.
Famines also happen under capitalism. There are multitude of famines in east Africa to choose from, death count is well over tens of millions. Outside of Africa, the Bengal famine happened under British rule, death count 1-4 million people. While socialism was gaining traction inside British isles at the time, their colonies kept being ruled by harsh free market advocates.
However blaming capitalism for the Bengal famine is unfair, where imperialism, colonialism, and racism is a much better explanation, similarly, blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation.
Famines aren’t the only man-made disaster out there. It is hard to blame anything but global capitalism for disaster such as the Bhopal disaster, where one of the largest cities in India was poisoned in a effort to maximize profits for shareholders. Thousands died.
Together the disaster of capitalism cause several orders more deadly than the disaster commonly attributed to communism.
> blaming communism for the Great Chinese Famine in Mao’s China is unfair, when fascism is a much better explanation
Not to nitpick, but was Mao's China fascist, strictly speaking? I ask because the big 3 fascist regimes of the 20th century (Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain) were all stridently anti-communist, anti-collectivist, and anti-Marxist. You can see a lot of the other elements of many definitions of fascism in Mao's regime, but that anti-communist part is really hard to square. One definition I appreciated is that fascism is vocally and stridently anti-equality, and by that standard, Mao's regime is clearly not a fascist one, even as it just as strongly authoritarian as any self-described fascist regime.
I'm actually not prepared to say that communism or capitalism is more deadly, because I think the reality is that the people making decisions got to that place because of skill in political infighting, not superior judgement on the topic at hand.
That is, the reason planned economies do fail is not because planned economies must fail, per se. Rather economies are, of necessity, massively complicated things and its very difficult to account for every variable adequately whilst planning, to say nothing of the difficulty of conniving the appropriate carrots and sticks for every participant at every level, to convince all participants to follow the plan.
What fascism and most countries that have called themselves "communist" have in common is authoritarianism.
95% of what most Americans criticize as "the evils of communism" are, in fact, the evils of authoritarian systems; it just happens that the big authoritarian system that was in opposition to America for decades called itself communist. Much like North Korea calls itself "democratic".
And while fascism is, indeed, anti-equality, the inequality it seeks to foster is almost always between a cultural in-group and Everyone Else. Furthermore, fascism does not always seek to murder the Other; it also seeks to forcibly assimilate them.
Guess what Mao did in China: systematically eradicated massive swathes of Chinese culture—or rather, cultures, because there were many differences between what it meant to be, say, Han Chinese vs Mongolian or Tibetan. The Uyghur genocide that is ongoing today is just an extension of that—and yes, it fits quite well with fascist ideals.
Cuba is facing a famine right now. Communism was the cause of authoritarianism in china and the ussr. It's not possible to have a command economy run by humans without eventually having the leader be an authoritarian.
Capitalism did not cause people to be greedy, they were already greedy. Capitalism just embraces our nature and aligns incentives while communism pretends people can be changed to not follow incentives.
Because the US has embargoed Cuba for decades to cause hunger and desperation:
> If such a policy is adopted, it should be the result of a positive decision which would call forth a line of action which, while as adroit and inconspicuous as possible, makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government. - https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v06...
The USA embargo in Cuba is not causing a famine because there is no famine. So you’re vitamin A deficiency did not cause your black eye, because you have enough vitamin B and C, and also you don’t have a black eye.
Also the embargo de jure excludes food and medicine (although de facto it is hard to export those to Cuba), but also subsidiaries of USA companies are also not allowed to trade with Cuba, so Canadian and EU companies which do business in the USA (which is almost everybody) are risking a lot by trading with Cuba, so in effect the embargo is somewhat extended by large parts of EU and Canada.
I don’t know where you get your news from, but no. There is currently no famine happening in Cuba. There is a fuel shortage (like there is in many other countries). But there is still enough food for everybody, and (unlike in many other neighboring countries) the food is distributed such that hunger is relatively rare, and mass hunger—let alone a famine—is unheard of. The cost of living is still significantly lower than the median income, despite the energy crisis and despite the embargo.
I honestly don’t know where you’ve heard this. I searched the news for a famine in Cuba, and nothing came up, not even unreliable sources. Where did you hear this?
You are exactly right. They seek to maximize profits. Profits can only exist within a coherent system of prices.
How can a central planner effectively determine prices across an entire economy? Price fixing has historically been disastrous, from Diocletian to the USSR. This is literally the definition of the calculation problem.
Contrast this to politicians and bureaucrats who may have additional political incentives towards kickbacks, corruption or other, non-market inefficient practices.
> No one is forcing you to buy things at Walmart
When Walmart comes into a small town and uses it’s economies of scale to force smaller stores to shut down because they have the ability to operate at a loss, is this choice?
Walmart has a board of executives that decide on the direction of the company, it’s a corporation the performs central planning in order to maximize profits.