Did you want me to pick at the rest of the OP, too? It has been done since I posted.
I’m not sure that I understand the intent of your question.
**
And the guy who grew the rice doesn’t do the same thing? The farmer tries to make as much money off of the rice he grew as he possibly can. He only has his interest at heart when he tries to make a deal. And yet the farmer and the merchant both walk away from the deal satisfied.
Commerce is a great thing.
Marc
If the result is unpopular enough, then the market will tell the producer to get bent.
Which is exactly what happened to Coca-Cola when they came out with “New Coke” in the '80s. Hence, “Coca-Cola Classic.”
If the switch to the different demographic is succesful, then there will be a company that will come along to appeal to the abandoned demographic.
Never mind that some people might have preferred the taste of New Coke over the Old Coke. It was just the idea of the drink being messed with that set so many off.
It’s an interesting rant, but what alternative to capitalism would you suggest? Judging from your thread title, it sounds like you have already ruled out communism, which is a smart move. The theory of communism looks great on paper, but is awful in actual practice.
You know yesterday I went to the market and traded my chicken for a rug, my homegrown tomatoes for a cell phone, and my handcraft quilt for an F-16. Boy was I glad I didn’t have to lug all of that heavy money around.
::catches:: Got it! Hey, Miller, would it be alright if I used it? I’ve been shopping round for a new sig line, and that’s definitely funny in my book.
This is what you find scary? Not nuclear war, not inner city poverty levels, not paying bills, not escaped mental patients with hooks for hands who terrorize young couples on lovers’ lanes? Do you have nightmares about evil hot dog stand owners pushing you to add sauerkraut just so they can add another fifty cents to their coffers? If so, consider yourself among the luckiest people on the face of the planet.
I don’t think people exist solely to consume products, but I suspect each person has to decide why they exist. I suspect I exist to read a lot, study human behavior, make snide observations and pet my cat and dog.
And I just want to add that ** Miller’s ** house must be a really great place to hang out.
Actually, this is the part that I love the most. It virtually guarantees that they will continue to provide them to me.
Well, ballybay, how about a case in point? Take sleeping sickness, a serious problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Not the world’s best market. There is no vaccine or prevention for sleeping sickness, but there are treatments. Eflornithine is a modern drug that has shown promise. However, it’s expensive, and the market is solely in impoverished African countries. Aventis discontinued production, leaving the only treatment an arsenic-containing compound called atoxyl. Patients are said to scream when the compound is injected, and it has the unfortunate side effect of causing many to go blind. It wasn’t profitable to produce.
Think of the behavior of tobacco companies. They denied for years that their product was harmful, and continued heavy marketing campaigns, some even targeted at children. Now, in the absence of any other outlets, the conglomerates that own these tobacco companies are running feel-good adds that tout their soi-disant humanitarian activities.
Think of the companies that manufactured DDT, asbestos, and lead paint. How about silicone breast implants? Flammable children’s clothing, and several makes of automobile that have a nasty tendency to catch fire in minor wrecks. Ford’s Pinto is one, and classic Mustangs tend to turn the passenger compartment into an inferno in rear-end collisions.
Head on over to the consumer product safety commission, and browse their EXTENSIVE list of recalls. Would these companies care in the least if not forced to by the government?
The fact that a product is dangerous or ridiculous will not stop a company from marketing and selling it. Somebody buys all that shit advertised on late night TV, and somebody is keeping the shopping channels in business. Advertising has not become the multi-billion dollar clusterfuck of an industry it is without producing some kind of results. Let’s see if we can force another greasy snack down these fatass consumer’s throats, or sell them a ridiculously oversized gashog of a car.
So many things to choose from, however I will stick with just one.
I don’t know how old you are, but if you are old enough you will remember a time when Detroit actually did try to downsize their cars and give us economical gas mileage. However the market place (meaning you and I) spoke. Consumers prefered big, gas guzzleing cars and trucks. America at least wants more power, more room, and are willing to take the hit at the gas pump. (I bet that will change again as gas prices continue to rise.) Just look at the SUV/anti-SUV threads on this board.
Merchants do not create the demand. They try to fill what they perceive is the demand. Some go broke when they guess wrong. Some make a fortune when they guess right. Buggy whips are no longer in the same demand as they were a hundred years ago. I bet the buggy whip manufacturers would love for there to be the same demand so that they can continue to have the high profits. However I haven’t noticed that they have been successful in creating that demand in us through their use of media and advertisements.
Go to the meat section of the grocery store and really observe what is there. No longer is there just hamburger. There is ground beef of various fat contents because there has developted a DEMAND for leaner beef products. The beef industry would rather have to provide only one type of ground beef. It would be easier and more profitable. But, consumers DEMANDED choices. Those companies that failed to provide the choices lost business. Therefore they lost profits.
Are there abuses by the merchants? Hell yes. There are abuses in any system.
Ads may convince me to try that first box of rainbow colored cheerios, but the product is what will have to sell me the second and third and so on. If I don’t like it, if I don’t want it, nothing will make me buy the second box.
And whether or not they destroy the environment the rest of us have to live in is, of course, wholly irrelevant.
I’d quote the whole post, but it’s really too long to make that worthwhile.
I’m glad, ** Trucido **, that I’ve made you pull your head at least half way out of your ass and think of examples that can’t be so easily shot down. Cases such as this are examples when it’s proper for the government or nonconcerned nongovernmental organizations to step in on behalf of the public. I think it would have been noble of the company to continue to produce the drug. However, if that act of nobility bled the company dry, they wouldn’t be there to research and manufacture new drugs. It’s a quandry.
Up to this point, though, Trucido, you haven’t talked about exploding cars or dying Africans. First post-you ranted about snack food and “making people buy things they don’t need.” The Africans clearly need drugs to fight sleeping sickness, so I fail to see how this can be equated with “force feeding the lard-asses of the service economy.”
If you want to rant about the world’s failure to address grave problems in Africa, wonderful. But you’ve bitched about Doritos, advertising, the Home Shop channel and the consumerisms of America and then bring up the suffering Africans. Is there some sort of connection between the two I’m missing?
Zoggie, you’re welcome to that sig.
Actually, it is. It’s nice that you can admit that. 
And Trucie… 'fore you criticize someone for nitpicking your post, you better make sure that you haven’t nitpicked anyone else’s. You already look stupid… why look like a hypocrite at the same time?
matt - you’re more addressing the inefficiencies of the market than the principle of it. To turn a profit, price should reflect fixed and variable costs of manufacture plus the appropriate loading. The trouble for some “products” is that the costs aren’t properly recognised. Environmental costs of fuel are certainly one such case - if prices were loaded appropriately via taxes to reflect future clean-up costs, petrol would cost a lot more and then consumers would certainly pay a lot more attention to their fuel efficiency.
Market inefficiency is a (if not the) major argument for regulation. This just happens to be one such case.
pan
Well, what method would you prefer? I can think of a few possible alternatives, let me know if any of these are what you want.
- The baker provides you with bread because he is compelled by a third party.
- The baker provides you with bread for free and trusts that someone will provide for his needs out of the goodness of their heart.
- The baker provides you with bread in exchange for you providing a service for him.
- The baker provides you with bread in exchange for some object that you possess.
- The baker doesn’t provide you with bread, you steal it from him because you can and no one will stop you.
- All bread is produced by the government, and it gives it to you.
- You purchase the ingredients from farmers and make your own bread.
- You grow your own ingredients and make your own bread.
Since you don’t seem to like our current system, perhaps you could pick which one of these you would prefer or tell me if I missed your preference.
Bullocks. Who is “we”? What “Other society” has chosen “enough” over more?
Well, if we agree, then why are we arguing?
Why is the failure of drug companies to provide expensive drugs for Africa a failure of capitalism? Actually it is a failure of the LACK of capitalism. Companies would be happy to make all the expensive anti-sleeping sickness drugs the market could support. Why don’t they? Because the Africans don’t have enough money to buy them. And why is that? Because they live under feudal governments.
Nothing is funnier than watching socialists/anti-capitalists trying to determine what a given product is actually “worth”. So, that rice was really worth 500 yen? Why? Simply because one merchant bought the rice at that price? What if the neighboring farmer sold an equivalant amount of rice for 400 yen? Wouldn’t that mean that the first farmer gouged the merchant? Or would it mean that the merchant gouged the second farmer?
There is no objective value for any good. Every single good is valued differently by different people at different times and at different places. For instance, at 12:00, I usually value a sandwich from the local deli higher than the $5.00 I have in my pocket. By 12:30, I no longer do so, since my stomach is full. I value the remaining $5.00 bill in my pocket higher than the sandwich, so I refrain from trading that bill for another sandwich. It’s very simple, really.
There are many services that merchants provide that the OP doesn’t recognize. Storage, risk of damage or spoilage, storefront rent, employee wages, transportation, convenience. And don’t denigrate convenience. What if you had to travel to the country every time you wanted to buy rice, then track down a rice farmer, dicker over the price with him, while he is wasting time that he could be using to grow more rice, then decide the price is too high so you try another farm a couple of miles over, then load your car with rice, then fill up with gasoline from the refinery since there are no gas stations, and you had to build the car yourself so it doesn’t run so well. Then you travel back to the city, where you store the rice in your bedroom since you had to buy a year’s supply since it costs too much to travel to the country. Then you decide you need vegetables to go with the rice, so it’s back to the country.
The merchant buyer gives the farmer an opportunity to sell all or most of his rice at once an not have to deal with selling it one carload at a time. Yes, the buyer offers a lower price for the rice than the farmer could get from a starving city dweller. But he also provides the farmer with more profit, since price is only one factor in profitablity. And if the buyer is making enormous profits from buying and selling rice, then other merchant buyers will get in on the act.
But what if the merchant hires soldiers to scare away the other merchants and take the rice by force? Then we don’t have capitalism but feudalism, and the “merchant” is really a feudal lord. The feudal lord gets his rice for “free”, but at a price: for some reason there isn’t nearly the amount of rice production that there used to be, since the farmers get nothing for the rice they produce. If the lord takes too much, the farmers starve or run into the forest. If the lord takes too little, the farmers get rich instead of him, and suddenly they are hiring soldiers to get stuff from him for free.
So, without the rule of law…without courts and laws that protect the farmer from having his rice taken by force…then capitalism is no longer possible. Capitalism is actually only possible under a highly sophisticated governmental structure, which brings us back to why Africa is so poor: no capitalism.
The thing about economics is that you can squeeze the balloon at one end, but you always seem to end up simply moving the air from one side to the other. If you regulate price, then suddenly quality and supply deteriorates.
Well, no, it’s not irrelevant, exactly. It’s just that the majority of consumers don’t seem to care if the environment is destroyed, or at least not enough for it to affect their buying habits. Fortunately, under a free market system, this can be corrected. Convince enough people that the environment is important and needs protection, and people will start buying lower polluting, more fuel efficient automobiles. One of the things the free market does, in fact, is express the values of the society. Is this the best economic system. Maybe not…people can be boneheaded and short sighted sometimes. Maybe the best system would be one of Plato’s philosopher kings, where those people who have enough knowledge and wisdom make decisions for the good of the community. Unfortunately, lacking a philosopher-king, we need to make do, and understand that our leaders are falible, also.
This seems so reasonable on its face, doesn’t it? It’s one of the most fantastic attributions of supernatural powers to the Free Market I’ve ever heard.
If there’s a building that’s an unsafe fire hazard, the municipal government doesn’t just go and put up ads all over the place that say, “Such-and-such a building is unsafe, don’t go live there.” The government steps in and condemns the fucker until such time as it’s brought up to code.
The reason for this is that we found out over the course of the last several hundred years that when grossly dangerous conditions are left to regulate themselves by the free market, getting the problem solved is not guaranteed. This is fine if you’re talking New Coke vs. Old Coke. It’s not fine when you’re talking about fire traps and earthquake hazards, and it’s definitely not fine when you’re discussing the future of human life on earth, specifically whether or not there will be one.