Economic Lesson VI: Investment
Photo Naninn, CC BY-SA 4.0
Why does a business do anything? Why is anything made? Why does this dumb movie even exist? All these questions have a pretty basic answer. To avoid being coy: The people who financed it thought they’d profit off the investment. But what’s investment? For all you tankies out there, investment is putting your money (including your own effort and/or time in many cases) where your mouth is. You think an idea is good? Make it a reality. Will it make a good return on investment or ROI? The investor sure hopes so!
Profit is why capitalism works so well, ya stinkin’ commies. Without the potential to profit off of an investment, why risk your own money in the first place? Profit is why capitalism will always defeat communism in the long run. See, we don’t run out of both guns and butter. You guys bloody sure will eventually. But, wait, where does that leave governments? As a proud defender of the American tradition of federalism, it is rather easy. The federal government should do almost nothing domestically. Secure the border, have a standing army, that kind of stuff. But the states? Go hog wild! If I hate the crap you’re doing, I can campaign against it to cause a change of power or, failing that, move to a state that more closely matches my needs, wants, and desires. Since it is almost impossible to do that on a federal level, federalism exists to make the states the laboratories of democracy. The federal government might be a constitutional republic, but the states are democracies. It really is that simple, brophalom.
What is this risk thing you mentioned? Let me break it down for you. Everything you do is a risk. Literally everything. Every single action and even every inaction you do creates externalities. What are those? An economic concept created by maniacs because they wanted to levy Pigovian taxes. What are those?!? A Pigovian tax is a tax on externalities. The problem is with The Fatal Conceit, just as it was with the nudge hypothesis. Please stop bringing up new concepts, you crazy bastard! The nudge hypothesis is the paternalistic belief that people are like cattle and can be easily “nudged” to doing what the people designing the nudges want them to do. Even if your aims are good, the road to Hell is paved with them. Where does it end? Authoritarian totalitarianism. Externalities are the idea that an action creates negative effects, even unintentionally. You deciding to eat in instead of ordering take out technically creates less economic value in the economy, as you didn’t pay someone to cook for you. While that may seem like an unfair example to those in favor of Pigovian taxes, there is literally no way to judge the true lost value of all the externalities in a capitalistic economy. Voluntary exchange means essentially infinite externalities with every action multiplied by millions and billions and trillions of actions and inactions every day by everybody. Central planners will always end up cheating and taxing that which they don’t like. Taxing something creates less of it; subsidizing something creates more of it. Because cheating is all the central planners can do in the face of the curious task.
Collectivism can never match the raw power of one individual to change the world. From the inventor of air conditioning to Fred Rogers, all it takes is one person to make a difference. But, but, but! Yes, it also requires the determination to see that difference through. Lots of people get discouraged. Like the hate-readers who write diatribes in the comments instead of turning those comments into articles on the very site you’re reading this on. Why do they publish me? Because I write in the first place. See, you could be published here, too, if you only tried. And that’s why tankies fail. They complain and criticize but never try. One must create to make the world a better place.
As I keep drumming into people’s heads here, I am a Hayekian. But I am a practical one. So, that one lingering question all the tankies have I will now answer. The investments that fail are all part of the engine of creative destruction. There is no such thing as a sure thing outside of cash cow media properties. Pokémon prints money for Nintendo because you can’t buy that kind of brand loyalty. It must be built over a period of several years with consistently good output. Every fan base has its angry dissenters, but all of the guff kicked up prior to the launch of Sword and Shield didn’t stop them from becoming the fifth best-selling game on the Switch. Over 21 million copies sold as of this writing.
To get back on topic, failure is why capitalism works. Failure is allowed. Communism sees any failure at all as bad and terrible and worse than ass cancer. You can’t have success without failure, and with capitalism, every success makes everyone better off. Everyone else does not benefit as much as the person who innovated in the first place, but that’s why investment works as a generator of adaptation and innovation. Necessity is the mother of all invention, but profit is the daddy.
Communism isn’t a good thing. What a refreshing and counter intuitive take. You never hear that kind of thing nowadays. But since we are always one micro second from communism taking over the country it’s good we know this.Report
Something something learning from history something something doomed to repeat it.Report
I love the implication that’s he lecturing to a blog full of tankies.
That’s literally the best part. This, this blog and it’s commentators, are just FULL of tankies.
Man, I love satire pieces.Report
Given the amount of revolutionary calls for the destruction of the Big Tech oligarchy, corrupt crony capitalists at Oreo, and the bitter denunciation of the imperialist warmongering Woke Generals, maybe this was intended for the Gateway Pundit crew.Report
I love the implication that we’re collectively wowed by this Econ 101 view of the world.Report
Actual Econ 101 is underrated. 95% of the Econ 101 bashing is coming from people who have less than that level of understanding, rather than more. But so is this post.Report
The epitome of Econ 101-splaining is that racism will end because it’s inefficient.Report
Whenever I see serious economic problems I look to see what the gov is doing.
In the case of Jim Crow we have the gov making non-racism illegal.Report
I’d say, we see government codifying existing racist practice. Which is terrible, but it’s not like people of all races were coexisting peacefully before the laws were passed.Report
While there’s lots of reasons Econ 101 doesn’t represent reality, one primary one is the fact that money is not the only thing that drives decision making.
I could make more in multiple other states, or even other jobs in my own town. Econ 101 says, pretty much, I shouldn’t be working where I am.
But I like my job, my commute, and the nearness of my family. I suppose I could try to put prices to those, but then I’m just money to approximate other things that drive my decision making.
Of course then there’s the big stumbling block: “In a rational world” and “Rational decision making”.
I mean heck, the stock market alone — what’s the old saw? “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent”….Report
Well, no, things like job satisfaction, commute, etc. are all things you value enough to offset any additional money you might make elsewhere.
The thing about racism is that by engaging in it to the effect of refusing customers and/or vendors, you are potentially hurting yourself, or at the very least limiting your ability to prosper, because of skin color.
It’s an odd thing to place such value on, and absent government enforcing rules to prevent others from competing with you for those customers/vendors, you’d be at best just getting by.Report
If by accepting black customers you’d lose business from white customers, refusing them can be profit-maximizing.Report
Then it’s a question of population and potential customers.
If you have a town that is 50% black and 50% white, your grocery and hardware/general stores are going to suffer if they play that game, and the more the white population stops caring about being racist, the more it’s going to hurt.Report
The entire post Civil War to CRA seems to disagree here/
“Whites Only” seemed to do just fine.
Even in, perhaps especially in, areas with significant minority population.
perhaps people value their racism more than money.Report
So it is all personal racism? Jim Crow was a lie and there is no structural racism that continues to linger from that period?
Sears mail order service didn’t do a decent amount of business back in the day selling to black customers who’d been shut out of local markets?
I mean, this is the whole thing about structural racism, isn’t it, that it continues to enable personal racism because the economic cost one would nominally suffer never really kicks in? This is why people engage in canceling, in order to try and invoke that cost when possible?Report
Looking at what the government is doing about this is useful, not just because it’s probably creating problems, but because it often showcases where people’s heads are at.
Having said that, Brown v Board of Education was in 1954, the 1960’s era of civil rights was in the 1960’s. We still talk about redlining as though it was ongoing but the practice was outlawed in 1968.
IMHO we’re far enough removed from Jim Crow that we need different explanatory factors for what we see now.Report
WTF does that have to do with your original statement?
You claimed ” If you have a town that is 50% black and 50% white, your grocery and hardware/general stores are going to suffer if they play that game”
When I pointed out that, for an entire century until it was stopped BY LAW, those businesses played that game and didn’t suffer. They thrived.Report
Or to put it another way-
The Jim Crow societies didn’t thrive as much as they would have, had they gainfully integrated all the talent and work of the minority citizens.
But, the important thing is, they were perfectly happy with that outcome.
The psychological benefits of having a lower caste were more valuable than the monetary loss.
And nothing much has changed in that regard.Report
Yes. Not only were they failing to take advantage of their human capital, they were actually using economic resources to keep people down.
Are there any “psychological benefits” to this?
?Report
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
― Lyndon B. Johnson
There are a series of articles currently which discuss how people were financially harmed under Trump, receive benefits from the Biden administration, yet refuse to reconsider their allegiance.
The benefits of hating an outgroup are more important than the monetary benefits of inclusion.Report
Man. I’m so glad that we’re so much better than those people.
I just wish that they’d all go away. I’d shell out money to see it.Report
Ouch. I find myself agreeing with this line of thought. Identity politics at its worst… or maybe the natural outcome.Report
I think I made my point badly, let me try this…
Racism, like communism, is a social system, not an economic one. It works kinda like an economic system, as long as the social component is maintained. But you are a solitary racist, your ability to thrive economically is impacted. You need some critical mass of people in your local economy who are willing, or forced, to adhere to your economic limitations. Defectors from the social component can not be tolerated, and thus some kind of control is put into place to keep folks in line.
Jim Crow was one such control. When Jim Crow was removed, a ‘softer’ kind of authoritarianism was put in place (one we are still dealing with today).
So yes, if you have my hypothetical 50/50 community, and enough of the white folks are racist and willing and able to exert social controls over the rest, you get that ‘soft’ Jim Crow.
Remove the ‘able’ part (by making it illegal to play such games), and they start to lose.
It’s not perfect, because you can’t make every such thing illegal, and Chip is right in that there are some folks who are able to afford to be racist (and willing to prop up others so they can also be racist), and others who are irrational about adhering to their racism regardless of the cost to themselves, so we struggle with that.
But if you were to suddenly decide that you can not abide the existence of blondes in your store, and you did not have enough people in your community willing to join in your intolerance, you would suffer for it.Report
If you have a town that is 50% black and 50% white, but the whites have 80% of the money and 100% of the terrorist organizations, it’s not a hard choice.Report
Probably a good point to ask what the gov is doing to enable this situation.Report
What they don’t tell you in Econ 101 is that economics is at base, the study of human behavior.Report
They do, if indirectly, by defining “rational behavior” as pursuing subjective goods. And then they ignore that by making all the exercises about tangible goods like rice and meat.Report
It’s trivially easy even for a layperson to do what economists do and create a toy model illustrating this. I think I have done it here before, so I’ll just sketch it in outline: you own one of two or three white tablecloth restaurants in a small to medium sized southern city in 1952. A significant chunk of your business is banquets by the local bar association, the local chamber of commerce, and the daughters of the confederacy. While you, personally, have no objection to serving solvent, clean, well-mannered negroes, you would at best, sell a few dozen tabletops a year, at the cost of your banquet business and some of your white customers. Easy economic decision.Report
Yes, this is an excellent illustration of my point. Thanks.Report
Econ 101: We’re gonna dumb this WAY down for you, you shouldn’t actually apply this to anything. It won’t work. This is…look you know the spherical cow joke? This is like a sphere floating in vacuum. It’s not even alive. It’s just a platonic solid. If you tried to model a cow with this, it’d explode. This is literally bare-bones sort of basics just to get you to understand some concepts in an entirely unrealistic setting”
Students of Econ 101: I UNDERSTAND ALL ECONOMICS AND TRANSACTIONS AND CAN ALTER THE WORLD WITH MY MIND. THE MYSTERIES OF POLITICS AND SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD IS LAID BARE.Report
Also why we don’t let first year engineering students who’ve just finished statics and kinematics design bridges, even though they can now compute the free body diagram.Report
That’s why we don’t allow physics students to touch bridges. EVER.
“Safety margins are for chumps and engineers”Report
And we don’t let people who’ve read a few web pages about coding build and distribute apps …
OK, the analogy had to break down somewhere.Report
As hilarious as this is, winning a Nobel prize in economics for “World of Warcraft Economics” is a HELL of a lot funnier.
And may say something about the state of the field in general…
[Ten gingersnaps if you can name the date.]Report
Actually MMORPGs make great datasets for economic analysis.
Unlike real life, you can get a FULL data set, you can factor in all the inputs and outputs, and people put enough effort and value into it that you can use it as a solid proxy for real economic decision making. (It’s not like poker with fake money, where people play differently because it doesn’t matter…)Report
Well yeah we are always just a milli second from The Communism taking over. Comrade Biden will have us wearing Mao jackets by the end of the weekend. Rich western countries do have a long hx of turning commie.
Why look at the UK, they were on the road to serfdom and exactly as predicted they are the leaders of the glorious revolution.Report
What’s revealing in many political discussions is how China is sort of the Schrödinger’s Cat of nations; Simultaneously Capitalist and Communist;
Or Norway, in the reverse direction; A social democracy powered by private property and highly regulated markets.
Which is what I was getting at in the other thread, where the sort of mid-20th century political theorists (like Hayek) don’t really have any useful way of looking at them or no useful advice for how to create policy. Not necessarily wrong per se; Just that thumping the tub for market freedom isn’t a particularly useful piece of information.Report
Which is what makes it so weird, right?
How does an authoritarian communist state lift its billion people out of poverty and become one of the most powerful economies in the world?
According to the script, they should be a dull gray backwater, where people stand in breadlines and drive sputtering two-stroke Trabants, not living in modern cities and driving BMWs.Report
China was the world’s largest economy in 20 out of the last 21 centuries. The most recent century the communists burned down the economy and got many tens of millions of people killed.
The starvation and poverty was largely created by their communist state.Report
For perspective, in 1921 (the year China’s Communist party was founded), the US was responsible for 15% of the GDP of the world but China was responsible for 10%.
The crushing poverty we think of as the Chinese normal was created by their communist party.Report
This is the strangest misrepresentation of 20th century Chinese history I’ve seen.
By the way, China representef even more of the world economy in 1870, but in 1912 a dynasty fell (not to communists), followed by civil strife, civil war, and a devastating war with Japan. GDP growth has been upwards since the Communists took power.
Also, even at the height of its prosperity in the Qing dynasty, rural Chinese peasants lived in extreme poverty. Wealthy country ~= wealthy populous.Report
The linear line up was when the communists gave up communism. Before that they took a nasty situation and made it much worse.
https://blog.givewell.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/china-gdp-per-capita-20-centuries.gif
This is from 1644 to 1912 so I’m not sure when it’s peak was.
I’m also not sure what “extreme poverty” means for the 17th (?) century world wide. I assume by modern standards everyone had that. I have no clue if China was better or worse by those standards nor do I know about inequality back then (I’m sure it was really nasty, but whether it was worse in Europe or better idk).Report
[Communists do not hold any power, and lose pretty badly in civil conflict]: It’s the Communists fault that things didn’t go well.
[Communists hold power, and things go well on your metric]: It’s not actually going well, because they’re Communist.Report
When they took over in 1949 they had an amazingly easy task because even that economic base was amazingly low because of the civil war and being one of the big victims in the run up to WW2. Just supplying order should have gotten them lots of economic growth.
Instead, the first 30 years of Communist rule (say 1950 to 1980’s) was them burning down the economy and ergo starving to death millions of people.
The graph I put up reflects this.
The massive gains happened afterwards which means they were starting from a artificially low base. They’ve done really well compared to what they did then.
So yes, if we ignore that they were the ones who burned down the economy and created many mass graves, they did really well from the 1980’s on and delivered massive growth.
Now they also did that by implementing reforms, i.e. rolling back communism.Report
Nobody is defending Mao but the China remained under the firm control of the CCP as Deng began the reforms that led over a billion people out of poverty. There was still a lot of state influence and control over the economy. Likewise, Taiwan moved in a more social democratic direction and started implementing more welfare state measures when it got wealthy enough to do so. Things like universal healthcare, etc.Report
“If you forget the tens of millions who died, totally great!”Report
A harsher spin would be “as the communist party officially gave up communism”.Report
With capitalist, though not free, Hong Kong. China is fine with cap business as long as they tow the line and, I assume, bribe the right people.
Communism, socialism and capitalism are to abstract to really say much about the real world. Almost discussions of them are useless. They will never be tried in a “pure” form whatever the hell that might mean.
You find real tankies on the tweeter to have arguments with. Sure they will be as fun as banging your head on a brick wall but everybody can have their own kink.Report
I hate commies. Tankies are the worst. Did I ever imply they were going to take over anything?Report
Well yeah they aren’t going to take over or mean anything here. We agree. So who cares about them. We need to make our capitalist system work well.Report
Philosophy, that’s why.Report
Then let’s talk about Nazis. They’ve more influential (remember a few years ago how intrigued people were with the alt-right?) and they’re even worse than communists.Report
There are 97 countries on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_socialist_states
Rich countries don’t have a history of turning commie because communism has very poor economic growth and/or creates economic problems. A number of countries would be “rich western” if they hadn’t gone with communism.Report
Apparently our whole little subthread is gone?Report
Weird. I can’t see it either.Report
I guess he really does hate communists.Report
There was no thread, Winston. It never happened.Report
This place clearly needs more communists.Report
They’re not *REAL* communists.Report
Alas, the true revolution never materialized in Germany.Report
They say that Biden will complete the system of German Idealism.Report
Arise ye prisoners of starvation….Report
Every morning, a post of the lyrics before any other posts here, possibly with videos of different renditions.Report
For the tyrants fear your might.Report
Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland
Beasts of every land and clime …Report
The reason we keep having these fights is that we don’t have any good terms for somebody who believes in an essentially private economy that isn’t capitalism. Since for many advocates and critics of capitalism, it means totally Wild West no regulation or welfare state private economy, you have a lot of New Deal/Great Society liberals that call themselves as socialists. This triggers the capitalist faction into apoplexy because that means we are only a stepping stone away from the Cultural Revolution.Report
Collectivism will always fail in the long run. Individuals change the world.Report
You have a very extensive definition of collectivism. Plus what is the modern multinational corporation owned and managed by stock holders through their elected officers and directors but a variety of collectivism?Report
What is Communism-in-practice but a variety of Capitalism-in-theory?
Capitalism killed that 100 million people.Report
There have been plenty of very exploitative business practices and atrocities under capitalism because business people are interested in making money rather than abstract theory. The Congo Free state? The Banana Wars in Central America? Business people have wielded state power when it was in their interest and rallied against it when it was not.
My other point is that capitalism is not necessarily an individualistic great man endeavor and communism is not necessarily entirely about collectivism. The most notorious Communist atrocities is when one lone figure managed to achieve such control over a system that they could do as they pleased. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were dictating everything that happened themselves. That certainly sounds like individuals changing the world to use Russel’s words., Meanwhile, capitalism can involve people acting together for a collaborative endeavor like making a blockbuster movie.Report
I’ve mentioned before that using “socialize” as a verb rather than a noun is more useful.
For instance, almost all utility and transportation infrastructure has been socialized for well over a century in almost all developed nations, and shows no sign of systemic failure.
Everyone here is drinking socialized water, flushing it down socialized sewers, working under socialized electricity, driving on socialized highways. And in most developed nations, living with socialized health care. And really, not even feeling the need to imagine anything different.
Is this “socialism”? No, because the other, larger component of society is private ownership.
So is that “free markets”?
No, because the markets themselves are erected and maintained by government.
These high concept ideologies are incapable of describing or providing any useful information about our world because almost all real world economies are a mixture of socialized and privatized factors of production.Report
Yes, all of that.
It’s useful and enlightening to talk about “what goods/services can the gov efficiently provide and why/why-not” and “ditto private industry”.
Similarly there are trade offs between various ideals, equality vs growth for example.
Mostly the political conversation is “vote for me and I’ll give you free stuff that someone else will pay for”.Report
There’s a issue with still using 19th century concepts to categorize 21st century economies, the definitions don’t line up well.
Communism/Socialism vs. Capitalism itself is a Marxist frame of the issue and starts to lose explanatory power the more you move away from it.Report
Because the government isn’t controlling it?Report
No. “Collectivism” is not “large numbers”.
(Google definition of Collectivism)
1) the practice or principle of giving a group priority over each individual in it.
2) the theory and practice of the ownership of land and the means of production by the people or the state.
(Wiki)
Collectivism is a value that is characterized by emphasis on cohesiveness among individuals and prioritization of the group over the self.
A multinational corp typically doesn’t have the ability to cram down it’s edicts on unwilling members in the name of unity, nor force people to buy it’s products, nor force workers to join it.
What Collectivistic efforts do about unwilling members is one of the real problems. The New Soviet man was supposed to be willingly sacrificing his or her life for the good of the collective.Report
Well, a multinational corp can cram it’s edicts on members of the workforce who’d rather not, leaving them with options of exit or compliance.
The other issue with any kind of collectivist org, be it a corporation or a government/commune is that above a certain size, the ‘membership’ can’t see the forest for the trees, and the ‘leadership’ starts treating the trees of the forest they manage as resources to use as they see fit.
The fact that they dress it up in language about the “Good of the community/nation/corporation” doesn’t change the fact that they tend to personalize the benefits/profits and socialize the costs.
In short, a collectivist organization of any stripe will, above a certain size, begin having problems with leadership. Most fail to grapple with those problems.Report
What’s interesting is that while we 20th century folk are always careful to draw a thick line between private and public exercises of power, the 18th century founders didn’t.
And its not like they were unfamiliar with large multinational corporations.
The Hudson Bay Company, the Dutch East India Company and others were very familiar to them. And so was the fact that these large entities behaved as quasi-governments in the parts of the world they controlled.
What the Founders grasped was that large agglomerations of power become detached from the control of the people, and it is entirely irrelevant whether they are public or private.Report
It got even worse going into the 19th century.
Robber barons, company towns — stuff we’d be shocked at happening today, but the Founders would probably have gone “Yeah, saw THAT coming”Report
If you can engage in war, genocide, and slavery then I’m not sure “quasi-government” is a good description. These groups were effectively governments in all but name in various parts of the world.
Now afaict, at the moment, we don’t have any large multinational corps able to act as a genocidal government. The closest we’ve seen recently to a non-gov actor trying to be a “quasi” genocidal government is ISIS.
Corporate power has gone down, a lot, relative to gov power.Report
In our modern world, we try to use public exercises of power to limit the all of the excesses of the private use of power.
Then we forget that “…that large agglomerations of power become detached from the control of the people…” is try for public power as well.
The trick is figuring out which excesses of private power can be tolerable, so as to avoid allowing public power to stare into the abyss it’s trying to protect us from.Report
If the gov says “individual rights are a legal thing”, then a corp’s ability to inflict collectivism is very limited.
Now if the gov says “individual rights are subordinate to collective rights” then we can get really nasty.Report
We have a government that said “corporations are people” with regard to political speech. Seems to me corporate collectivism won at that point as a matter of scale if nothing else.Report
I think it was more of a “the government doesn’t get to censor the speech of corporations either”.Report
How nasty Collectivism is should be measured by it’s ability to abuse individuals, not by it’s total number.Report
Cooperative Capitalism?Report
There are lots of worker owned cooperatives that are very big companies. One of the biggest companies in the U.K. is a worker-owned cooperative. Rainbow Grocery in SF is a worker owned cooperative.Report
Woodmans grocery markets in WI and other parts of the midwest are worker owned.Report
That what Tito was going for with market socialism. All I’m noting is that that capitalism is not always about individualism because many businesses compose of people working together rather than alone.Report
Case in point!
For the tl;dr crowd, European car makers were just fined a healthy bit for colluding to NOT introduce and compete on new technology that would reduce automotive tailpipe emissions.Report
There’s also price fixing to consider, which is a problem even in regulated markets.
I mean right now, in some areas, it’s bluntly obvious but apparently doing something about it is…impossible?
Drugs in America — both OTC and prescription — are clearly suffering from some significant degree of collusion. Insulin is the most obvious, but even super old stuff like albuterol and such see massive price increases despite widespread competition, lower manufacturing costs, and no R&D costs.
Insulin is obvious — I mean it’s roughly 5 to 10 times more expensive in America than anywhere else, despite increasing competition. It looks like Walmart got so sick of it they’ve gone ahead and are launching their own stuff (not the previous “cheap Walmart stuff” which was pre-Humalog human insulin, which is significantly more dangerous and harder to use than anything from 1994 on, but basically the same stuff as Humalog/Novalog/Triesba/etc), priced at….well, 30ish a vial, which given manufacturing costs is something like 20 bucks a vial profit.
(Seriously, insulin is dirt cheap to manufacture these days. Modifying a single celled organism to excrete it is the most expensive part, and that’s incredibly cheap. We’re talking a few million, tops and it’s pretty much a one-off cost. The process after that isn’t much more complicated than beer making.)Report
I question whether we have markets in HC, I also think we’re looking at regulatory capture.Report
The problem is, IMHO, the definition of collusion seems to be akin to conspiracy, in that you have to prove an agreement, rather than simply a wink and a nod that no one will try to undercut the market too much.Report
Exactly.
I mean it COULD be coincidence that, say, Humalog and it’s competitors kept rising their prices in lockstep — and that generics (well, bio-similiars in this case) were always priced at roughly 70% the name brand and ALSO rose in price with the name-brand stuff.
I mean it could just be some crazy market quirk where declining costs of production and total lack of any manufacturing bottlenecks combined with increased competition spurned a race to the highest possible price….
Or, you know, price-fixing a thing that’s gone on since someone came up with the idea of bartering.
Proving it in court is, of course, another matter. But obvious price fixing is still obvious.Report
Again, the rhetoric in this post is at 10 and the substance is at 2, and ideally those numbers should be reversed. You’re showboating at the 45-yard line. Try picking a specific, concrete claim and making a coherent argument for or against it.Report
No.Report
Why should he start now? We reward him with dozens of comments (including this one) for a complete lack of substance.Report
There is a huge variety of economic views between complete anarcho-capitalism and communism. It is not a binary.Report
This was a real throwback article and I enjoyed it. For an instant I was in my 20’s and reading another Hayekian article on NRO in the early to mid aughts. It was refreshing if not very illuminating.
This breed of article was all the rage back in those decades and it’s really curious looking at the world that followed. Everything that wasn’t pure republitarianism was, automatically, socialism and thus pure evil. Everything that was republitarianism was, automatically, capitalism and thus was pure good. Roll the clock forward a decade and change. Now everyone despises “capitalism” and thinks “socialism” is probably not that bad. Even on the right! It’s nuts. I would never have predicted that the right could flip word meaning and popularity so fundamentally. Arguably the left has done the same with the word racist and did so earlier too so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.Report