But what if i don’t want a pig? What if I want 2, and some other guy wants one?
The ‘social convention’ you talk about will cause you to want to maximise profit.
And you know these based on your extensive industry research?
This statement is utterly false, as are most of the rest of your overly broad generalizations.
No, it violates the principle of “Why pay someone $10 an hour when someone else will do it for $5.”
What might be a better solution is to force white collar jobs to pay overtime just like the blue collar jobs. In certain professions, there is no economic cost for forcing employees to work long hours. In fact, in many occupations like consulting or law, the longer hours you bill, the more money is generated. Quite frankly, other than IT, consulting, banking or law, I don’t know too many mid-level white collar workers who work exhorbitant hours. I’ve seen a lot of companies and most people tend to be out of there by 6:00pm.
An economy may be an artifical construct, but it still follows basic laws of human nature and common sense:
-People want as much as they can get for as little as they have to pay for it.
-Everything has a cost associated with it in terms of time, labor, or capital
-Not everyone wants or needs the same thing or the same amount
-In the long term, everyone has to put into the system at least as much as they take out.
-No one has the “right” to any product or service that is the result of someone elses labor.
As ravage2 pointed out, if there is only one pig farmer and chicken farmer in your economy, you can set the price to whatever you want. If there are many, you can’t cry “unfair” when you can’t make a sale because the pig farmer down the road wants one chicken and you’re selling for two.
Yes, it is a social convention, but that convention is rooted in human nature. And when you put hundreds of millions of people together, acting economically as human beings, the net result is a system of feedback and control just like an ecosystem in nature.
It’s just masses of people being people, and doing what comes naturally-- trading value for value. Why do you think Black Markets exist? It’s just a natural reaction to any system that tries to manipulate or control the perceived value people place on goods and services.